In Africa, feminism has never been a foreign concept. Women’s contributions to African societies have been exceptional throughout the continent’s history. Matrilineal societies spread across Africa, including among the Akans, the Zandes, the Baïnouks, and the Bushmen. The ordination of women was authorized in ancient Egypt while Europe is still debating it today. In Nubia (in Sudan today), the Candaces, who wielded the sword and were buried in the pyramids, built more pyramids in seven hundred years than the pharaohs did in three thousand years. They had the right to choose their husbands and even when they would get married. The Kingdom of Dahomey in present-day Benin had a formidable all-female military regiment from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. In Senegal, the brave women of Nder embodied the resistance to Moorish slavery in the nineteenth century. From Aline Sitoe Diatta of Senegal to the Nigerien queen Sarraounia Mangou and Kimpa Vita of Kongo, there are countless women heroes in Africa’s history who helped guide the continent on the path to independence and freedom.
As we celebrate Women’s History Month in 2025, much of this history of African women has been strangely forgotten. Instead, the international community often treats African woman as an object for study and, frequently, misinterpretation.
On the one hand, she is perceived as the demographic symbol of the African continent whose population is doubling every thirty years and must be contained. On the other hand, she is the one who keeps communities together and, outside the house, tends to be the world champion of entrepreneurship. She is also the primary victim of African conflicts. To paraphrase the French dramatist Jean-Baptiste Racine, the African woman deserves neither this excess of honor nor this indignity.
In fact, the African woman carries within her both a universal dimension that makes her a woman like any other and a singularity that makes her exemplary. Through data from multilateral organizations, however, each dimension of her existence seems to be under scrutiny.
Marriage. While only 2 percent of the world’s population lives in polygamous households, it is in sub-Saharan Africa that polygamy is most practiced (11 percent of the population), with all the rivalries, suffering, and conflict that can often be caused by families composed of several co-wives. As the United Nations (UN) Commission on Human Rights concluded in a 2019 report, polygamy is first and foremost discrimination against women. The practice also feeds into the wider problem of gender-based violence, which impacts 42 percent of women in eastern and southern Africa.
Pregnancy. African women are 130 times more likely to die from pregnancy-related complications than women in Europe and North America, according to a 2024 report by the UN Population Fund. When they survive childbirth, their child is likely to enter the risk zone: according to the World Health Organization, the infant mortality rate indicates seventy-two deaths per one thousand successful births in Africa, the highest rate in the world.
At work. When women in sub-Saharan Africa work, it is, according to a 2018 report by UN Women, mostly (89 percent) in informal employment. Although the African informal sector is not always a curse (behind this economic practice, there is a valuable sense of solidarity within the communities and many advantages foreign organizations don’t see), most international organizations consider informal employment to be problematic, citing “low pay, long hours, no sick or maternity pay, unsafe workplaces.”
During war. In conflict zones such as the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of the Congo or Sudan, women are prime targets for rape as a weapon of war. They are also the most efficient actors when it comes to rebuilding communities torn apart by war, to the point of inspiring the landmark UN Resolution 1325 on women’s participation in peace processes.
As elderly persons. Despite all this, African women live longer than African men. However, among the world’s women, they have the lowest life expectancy (sixty-five years compared to more than eighty years in Europe and North America), according to 2023 data.
These terrific data have led development agencies and international financial institutions to praise the resilience of African women. Would this type of language be used for women from Norway or the United States? Yet, this reality is accepted when it comes to African women.
The celebration of the resilience of African women belies the fact that they still do not get enough support in facing their exhausting daily lives. It echoes the racist bias that Black people—and Black women in particular—are more tolerant of pain, a belief rooted in stereotypes in the medical community about Black people’s supposed physical attributes. These and other prejudices are likely at the root of the fact that pregnant Black women are significantly less likely to have labor induced and more likely to have caesarian sections than white women. Among American women, Black women are three times more likely to die in childbirth than white women. Higher incomes and educational attainment do not spare Black women from the effects of these health outcome disparities. A 2023 UN Population Fund report finds that maternal deaths among African-American college graduates remain 1.6 times higher than among white women without a degree.
But while these statistics can help policymakers understand the work that remains to improve the lives of women in Africa, as well as in the diaspora, they neglect to say anything about the often-overlooked achievements of African feminism. Here are some less well-known statistics and facts that are no less important to understanding the lives of African women in 2025.
First, there’s women’s participation in national legislatures. While women heads of state and government are more often found in Western countries, it is in the Southern Hemisphere that the highest proportion of women parliamentarians are found. Rwanda tops the list, as 61 percent of the country’s members of Parliament are women.
Next, African women lead some of the most far-reaching and impactful multilateral organizations in the world. These include Nigeria’s Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, the director-general of the World Trade Organization; Rwanda’s Louise Mushikiwabo, the secretary general of Organisation internationale de la Francophonie; and Uganda’s Winnie Byanyima, the executive director of the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS).
And finally, some African nations have made significant strides on labor market equality. According to a 2024 World Economic Forum report measuring gender parity in labor market outcomes, Namibia ranked eighth in the world, higher than Spain (tenth), Belgium (twelfth), and Great Britain (fourteenth). South Africa ranked eighteenth, placing it above Switzerland (twentieth), France (twenty-second) and the United States (forty-third).
So this Women’s History Month, let us turn our attention not just to the litany of statistics cataloguing the challenges African women endure, but also their overlooked feminist breakthroughs. African women deserve recognition not just for the indignities they face, but for the heights they achieve.
Rama Yade is the senior director of the Atlantic Council’s Africa Center.
The Africa Center works to promote dynamic geopolitical partnerships with African states and to redirect US and European policy priorities toward strengthening security and bolstering economic growth and prosperity on the continent.
Further reading
Thu, Mar 13, 2025
What airstrikes in Somalia show about the war on terror
AfricaSource By Alexander Tripp
With terrorist groups increasingly prevalent throughout Africa, the United States is likely to devote more attention to counterterrorism efforts on the continent.
Fri, Feb 28, 2025
Senegal’s president must not miss the opportunity afforded by the country’s democratic spotlight
AfricaSource By
President Bassirou Diomaye Faye must actively use the opportunity provided by the rekindling flame of democracy to usher in a new era.
Mon, Feb 24, 2025
Trump’s dismantling of USAID offers a new beginning for Africa
AfricaSource By Rama Yade
African leaders should take advantage of the dismantling of USAID to propose new partnerships made up of direct investment and fairer trade, Rama Yade writes.
Image: A woman walks near a wall mural in Lagos, Nigeria, January 17, 2025. REUTERS/Taiwo Arifayan