Advocacy & Development
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Women’s leadership is advancing, but parity remains decades away. Women hold 27.4 per cent of parliamentary seats, 35.6 per cent of local government positions and 30.5 per cent of managerial jobs worldwide – all only slight improvements over 2015 levels.
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Despite progress on gender-responsive budgeting and legal reforms, systemic barriers persist. More countries are adopting gender-responsive budgeting, but only one in four has a comprehensive system. Since 2019, 99 legal reforms have advanced women’s rights, but discriminatory laws and barriers to land ownership and secure tenure remain widespread.
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Violence and harmful practices continue to undermine the rights and agency of millions of women and girls. Nearly one in three women has experienced violence in her lifetime, almost half of married or partnered women lack full bodily autonomy, nearly one in five girls still marries before the age of 18 and 230 million girls and women have undergone female genital mutilation. Regional successes, however, show that legal reforms and changing social norms can drive progress.
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Achieving gender equality requires sustained investment in sexual and reproductive health, decisive action to remove discriminatory laws and end harmful practices, stronger women's economic rights and gender-responsive financing, and a transformation of the social norms and institutions that continue to limit women's and girls' opportunities.
They are mocked, they are dismissed with jokes, they are humiliated online with deepfakes – they even have their very lives threatened. And still, as the poet Maya Angelou said, they rise. In this episode, Politically Aweh honours the fearless women of South African political life.
In honour of Women’s Month 2026, this week the satirical political podcast Politically Aweh shines a light on the sexism, disinformation and threats of violence perpetrated against the women who speak out in the political sphere in South Africa, to bully them into silence and acquiescence.
Ferial Haffejee, Associate Editor of Daily Maverick, was one of the first women in media who was exposed to this first-hand. “Very quickly it jumps from the ether into the real world.”
“The digital world isn’t separate from the real one any more,” says Politically Aweh co-host Zoë Barnes. “What starts with a post can become harassment; what starts with misinformation can become violence.”
“I’ve been threatened. It’s very scary,” admits Caryn Dolley, an investigative reporter who focuses on organised crime at Daily Maverick.
Political analyst Tara Roos received death threats so serious that she had to open a police investigation. “After I spoke online about the attacks that I received, there were many female journalists that also spoke up online and who contacted me to say they’d experienced the same thing,” she says. “I think threats like these are aimed at silencing people, and we should not be silenced,” she tells KG. “We should not be threatened for giving an opinion.”
Half a decade after the Taliban takeover in August 2021, Afghanistan has systematically dismantled the rights of half its population, making it a global outlier with no parallel in the modern world.
Over the past five years, the de facto authorities have issued more than 100 decrees targeting women and girls, institutionalizing discrimination and stripping them of their fundamental rights – with profound consequences for their lives and for their communities, according to new UN Women data. In the past year alone, this exclusion of women and girls from education, employment, public life, justice systems, and healthcare has only intensified, entrenching what remains the world’s most severe women’s rights crisis.
This unparalleled crisis of women’s and girls’ rights is at risk of being forgotten by the world.
Artificial intelligence is no longer a distant prospect for Africa’s courts. It is changing how evidence is assessed, cases are managed and justice is delivered. But with that transformation comes a defining challenge: how can technology advance justice without reproducing the inequalities it should help overcome? In Johannesburg, Africa’s senior women judicial leaders gathered to help shape the answer.
The Second High-Level Meeting of Women Judicial Leaders of Africa, hosted by the Office of Chief Justice of South Africa was held from 20-24 April 2026 under the theme "The Maputo Protocol @20: Consolidating the Jurisprudence of Equality for the Next Generation," brought together more than 300 Chief Justices, Presidents of Constitutional Courts and senior judicial leaders to address emerging challenges facing justice systems across the continent.
As a knowledge partner, UNESCO, with the generous support of the European Union, and its Social Media 4 Peace Coalition contributed to the high-level session on "Artificial Intelligence, the Digital Frontier and Women's Rights." Through its AI and the Rule of Law Programme, UNESCO highlighted both the opportunities AI offers to improve access to justice and the risks it poses when deployed without human rights safeguards. In addition, through its Social Media 4 Peace (SM4P) Project, supported by the European Union, UNESCO further contributed to the event by disseminating the Judicial Handbook on Countering Harmful Online Content. The Handbook serves as a strategic resource for judicial leaders, offering a human rights-based framework to strengthen judicial responses to hate speech, disinformation, and other harmful online content, while safeguarding freedom of expression and reinforcing the rule of law in the digital age.
Participants at the meeting
AI is increasingly supporting judicial administration, analysing evidence and improving responses to gender-based violence. However, it can also reinforce historical bias, facilitate technology-enabled violence and deepen discrimination if left unchecked.
Speaking during the session, Eunice Smith, Head of the UNESCO Office in Namibia and UNESCO Representative, stressed the responsibility of judicial leaders to ensure AI remains accountable to human rights.
Judicial leaders have a critical role to play in demanding transparency about training data, insisting on human oversight, and applying frameworks such as the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women.
Bedette van Loggerenberg of the University of Oxford emphasised that judicial readiness is essential as AI becomes part of modern justice systems.
AI is already reshaping the realities of judging, evidence, and access to justice. For judicial leaders, the challenge is not to become technologists, but to remain curious, informed, and equipped to ask the right questions. Continuous judicial education is essential to ensure that courts can respond to rapidly evolving technologies while safeguarding fairness, human dignity, and the rights of women and vulnerable communities.
UNESCO also showcased practical tools to help courts navigate this new frontier, including its Guidelines for the Use of AI in Courts and Tribunals and the new AI, Justice and the Rule of Law online course, developed with the University of Oxford. The course includes a dedicated module on AI and Women's Rights, equipping judges with the knowledge to identify algorithmic bias, assess AI-generated evidence and apply human rights principles in judicial decision-making. Through its Global Judges Initiative, UNESCO has already trained more than 38,000 judicial operators in over 160 countries, strengthening judicial capacity to govern AI responsibly.
A landmark outcome of the meeting was the adoption of the Johannesburg Declaration, which commits African judiciaries to ensuring strong human oversight, transparency and accountability in AI systems while promoting judicial education, digital literacy and survivor-centered digital justice tools. It also calls for AI to advance not undermine the rights, safety and equality of women.
Beyond artificial intelligence, the Declaration reaffirmed a collective commitment to strengthening gender-responsive jurisprudence by advancing women's leadership in the judiciary, improving protection against violence, promoting women's economic empowerment and deepening implementation of the Maputo Protocol through greater regional collaboration.
By bringing together judicial leaders, international experts and development partners, UNESCO reaffirmed its commitment to supporting African judiciaries in building AI-ready justice systems that uphold human dignity, protect women's rights and strengthen the rule of law.
As Africa embraces the opportunities of the digital age, the message from Johannesburg was clear: innovation must serve justice, and justice must always serve humanity.
The event featured testimonies from young leaders, interactive discussions, and a showcase of impactful initiatives spanning mental health, arts, social inclusion and cultural heritage.
The event also marked the second anniversary of SEVENTEEN’s appointment as UNESCO’s first Goodwill Ambassador for Youth in June 2024. Since then, the partnership has supported and resourced the Global Youth Grant Scheme, Going Together, providing grants to 100 youth-led projects across 64 countries, enabling them to reach over 21,000 direct beneficiaries and engaging more than 1.2 million people online. These initiatives have delivered more than 700 community-based activities addressing key global priorities through creative, locally driven approaches.
The United Nations Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) began its 10-day session in New York on Monday, amid efforts by the United States to weaken women’s rights proposed in the draft outcome document.
The theme of the CSW, the world’s biggest global meeting on women’s rights, is “ensuring and strengthening access to justice for all women and girls.”
But the US, after initially abstaining from negotiations on the outcome document to be adopted by CSW, changed tack in the past few days and urged the removal of “controversial social issues” from the document, Devex reports.
The US wants references to climate change and a gender-responsive justice sector removed, and does not support the proposed reparations fund for survivors of violence, for example.
However, the entire purpose of the CSW’s 70th session is to chart a path to eliminating gender discriminatory laws, policies, and practices, as well as structural barriers to justice – and the outcome document due to be adopted by the end of Monday was supposed to guide this.
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Women’s leadership is advancing, but parity remains decades away. Women hold 27.4 per cent of parliamentary seats, 35.6 per cent of local government positions and 30.5 per cent of managerial jobs worldwide – all only slight improvements over 2015 levels.
-
Despite progress on gender-responsive budgeting and legal reforms, systemic barriers persist. More countries are adopting gender-responsive budgeting, but only one in four has a comprehensive system. Since 2019, 99 legal reforms have advanced women’s rights, but discriminatory laws and barriers to land ownership and secure tenure remain widespread.
-
Violence and harmful practices continue to undermine the rights and agency of millions of women and girls. Nearly one in three women has experienced violence in her lifetime, almost half of married or partnered women lack full bodily autonomy, nearly one in five girls still marries before the age of 18 and 230 million girls and women have undergone female genital mutilation. Regional successes, however, show that legal reforms and changing social norms can drive progress.
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Achieving gender equality requires sustained investment in sexual and reproductive health, decisive action to remove discriminatory laws and end harmful practices, stronger women's economic rights and gender-responsive financing, and a transformation of the social norms and institutions that continue to limit women's and girls' opportunities.
30 global leaders unveiled their groundbreaking solutions for gender equality today as part of UN Women’s HeForShe movement. Addressing critical policy issues, changing the course of business leadership and the futures of our next generation, these proven practices have the potential to see gender equality achieved within our lifetime.
HeForShe’s IMPACT Champions, comprised of 10 Heads of State, 10 global CEOs and 10 University Presidents, came together to share with the world the key obstacles they have faced on their journeys, as well as the innovative proven practices that can now empower the rest of the world. H.E. Arthur Peter Mutharika, President of Malawi, shared the story of how his country has ended child marriage once and for all, allowing more than 1500 girls to return to education. Bob Moritz, Chairman of PricewaterhouseCoopers International Limited shared the story of how his organization has gone from 18 per cent female representation in the Global Leadership Team in January 2016 to 47 per cent by December 2016. Paul Boyle, President and Vice-Chancellor at the University of Leicester (U.K.) led a dynamic conversation on how students are generating solutions to address gender-based violence on their campuses.
“The results announced in today’s IMPACT 10x10x10 Parity Report are inspirational. In 2015, I challenged the Champions to ‘think big’ and commit to creative approaches that tackled the greatest barriers. We know that incremental steps do not bring us the benefits that we so urgently need,” said Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, Executive Director of UN Women. “As leaders in their fields the Champions hold the key to breaking norms and making game-changing progress for both women and men. The report shares strategies, roadblocks and successes so others can follow suit.”
Introduction
Targeted online violence against women in public life is increasingly technologically sophisticated and damaging, triggering alarming rates of mental health diagnosis, heightened self-censorship, and more frequent escalation to law enforcement. For women human rights defenders and activists, journalists and media workers, and writers and other public communicators, online violence is often deliberate and coordinated, aiming to silence them while undermining their professional credibility and personal reputations. It also serves to fuel the reversal of hard-won rights in a climate of rising authoritarianism, democratic backsliding and networked misogyny. Gender rights rollback is both enabled and exacerbated by technologies which — by design — amplify misogynistic hate speech for profit.
Generative AI apps are the latest manifestation of this form of subjugation. They do not just ‘nudify’ women and girls instantaneously without their consent, they simulate them being sexually assaulted. AI-assisted ‘virtual rape’ is now at the fingertips of perpetrators. This phenomenon deepens and accelerates the harm inflicted on women in public life who are increasingly targeted in online violence campaigns with an escalation in associated offline attacks, abuse and harassment, as our previous research has shown. In this publication — the second installment in the Tipping Point series that examines how online violence is constraining women’s participation in public life in the AI Age — we focus primarily on manifestations of image-based abuse and what happens after exposure to such online violence. How are survivors affected personally and professionally? What coping mechanisms do they deploy? And how do they seek legal redress? Our data is derived from a UN-Women commissioned global survey which was distributed in late 2025 in five languages, in partnership with UNESCO and the International Center for Journalists.
Across the globe, deliberate illiberal strategies that exploit entrenched gender inequality are increasingly being used to weaken democratic institutions from within. The dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) was not simply a byproduct of chaos at the beginning of U.S. President Donald Trump’s second term. Rather, it followed a well-documented authoritarian strategy in which attacks on gender equality are used to consolidate power, narrow civic space, and make democratic governance harder to defend. While the process of dismantling the agency that administered U.S. government foreign assistance has been well documented, significant gaps remain between what insiders witnessed and what the broader public understands. This gap in understanding is not benign. When the public perceives these events as isolated policy shifts rather than coordinated institutional erosion, it diffuses accountability, obscures the impact, reduces resistance, and allows similar tactics to be redeployed without scrutiny.
The administration’s early actions targeting gender equality, women’s empowerment, LGBTQI+ initiatives, and diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility functions operated not as peripheral policy disputes but as frontline tactics that weakened foreign assistance infrastructure, government institutions, and democratic norms. Trump has used this approach since at least 2016. It was mapped out in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025. Drawing on firsthand experience and technical analysis, this report situates these actions within an effective authoritarian pattern of leveraging patriarchal norms and cross-ideological gender bias to justify institutional retrenchment, create administrative compliance, and accelerate structural dismantling. Ultimately, the strategic sidelining of gender equality functions increased institutional vulnerability. Although the Trump administration’s targeting of those functions did not create the vulnerability, it recognized, exposed, and exploited it as part of a wider effort to erode democratic norms. Rebuilding democratic systems and foreign assistance architecture, therefore, will require treating gender equality as a core resilience safeguard rather than a peripheral policy concern. Its strategic targeting is central to the broader authoritarian assault on democracy. Democracy stakeholders must name that pattern, examine the decisions that enabled it, and learn from what unfolded.
Since Tunisia’s 2011 revolution, digital platforms have become central to political participation in the country, enabling female politicians, elections candidates, activists and public figures to mobilise communities and shape public debate.However, this visibility has drastically exposed women in politics to various forms of Technology-Facilitated Gender-Based Violence (TFGBV) : Online harassment, sexualised abuse, defamation, threats and coordinated smear campaigns are routinely used to undermine women’s credibility, silence their voices and deter their participation in political life. Beyond the severe harm inflicted on individual women in politics, TFGBV constitutes a structural threat to all women’s political rights, democratic pluralism and freedom of expression. By reinforcing misogynistic norms and normalising sexist intimidation, it erodes hard-won gains of women’s political participation in Tunisia.
What is at stake extends beyond Tunisia. The 2011 Revolution of Dignity which ended the Ben Ali dictatorship marked a historic turning point, igniting the so-called ‘Arab Spring’ and positioned Tunisia as a symbol of democratic possibility in the region and on the African continent. Earlier milestones, from the Personal Status Code of 1956 to progressive reforms including Organic Law No. 58-2017 on the elimination of violence against women and girls (Law 58), have long cast Tunisia as a reference point for women’s rights and legal reform. Tunisia’s trajectory sends signals across Africa and the Middle East about what becomes possible when women’s rights are defended and what collapses when they are politically sacrificed.
This webinar focused on barriers, challenges and strategies pertaining to the issue of gender parity for women in politics. Our guest speaker for the discussion was Dr. Mona Lena Krook.
Applying an intersectional lens the webinar discussion drew on research from Dr. Mona Lena Krook’s book, Elect Women for a Change: The Path to Gender Parity in Politics, Dr. Krook presented a core thesis: the global political community must move beyond aspirational "critical mass" targets (typically 30%) toward a non-negotiable 50/50 parity framework. This shift represents a transition from viewing women’s participation as an elective "add-on" to recognizing it as a fundamental requirement for democratic legitimacy.