When Santander’s artificial intelligence (AI) technology flagged unusual activity on a customer’s account last year, the bank’s staff had no idea it would lead to a human trafficking network being uncovered. 

On their own, the transactions didn’t look like much. A 34-year-old man was making regular payments to budget airlines, mobile phone providers and Vivastreet and Gumtree, websites that can be used to advertise genuine adult services but also sell everything from cars to computers. 

But the bank monitors and analyzes millions of transactions using technology run by Thetaray, an AI-powered financial crime detection company, to spot patterns — and when something falls outside those patterns. 

Without AI, this activity wouldn’t have been picked up, said Stephen Jennings, head of transaction monitoring at Santander, whose team disclosed the case to the National Crime Agency, the UK’s national law enforcement agency. 

“By understanding what is normal, AI will then very quickly tell you what’s not normal,” said Peter Reynolds, Thetaray’s chief executive officer. “And that thing that doesn’t look normal is potentially crime.”

In recent years, advances in AI technologies have helped transform the detection of human trafficking and modern slavery, allowing businesses like Santander, nonprofit organizations and law enforcement to flag risks more effectively. 

Last year’s U.S. State Department Trafficking in Persons report, an annual status update on global anti-trafficking efforts, actively encouraged technology companies to use “data and algorithm tools” to detect patterns and identify suspicious activity.

Yet beyond the potential, others have raised the alarm. Human rights organizations and survivors warn that collecting data on marginalized populations and automating decisions can pose a threat.

“There is, as with a lot of AI-related technologies, tensions in using it, right?” says Anjali Mazumder, who leads the AI, Justice and Human Rights program at The Alan Turing Institute, the UK’s national institute for data science and artificial intelligence.

“What’s needed is recognizing that, yes, these tools exist that could be helpful to detect harm, but they can also cause harm…”

Around 2017, Mazumder ran workshops on modern slavery, which were attended by British government officials, United Nations agencies such as the International Labor Organization and NGOs. When the topic of AI and machine learning (a subfield of AI which uses algorithms that learn from data to make increasingly better decisions) was brought up, there was a lot of interest but minimal use, she says. 

Fast forward nearly a decade and the landscape looks very different.

Take Global Fishing Watch, for example. The U.S.-based nonprofit uses AI technology to tackle the widespread use of forced labour in fisheries around the world. Their model, which combines satellite data and machine learning, shows vessels with crews that are subject to forced labour behave differently to other fleets – such as travelling further from ports.

Like with any AI tool, good data is needed but it’s often siloed across a vast modern slavery ecosystem. The Traffik Analysis Hub, a UK nonprofit, works to address this, sourcing global data from leading non-profit organisations, law enforcement and open-source data such as journalists’ reporting. 

Using AI technologies developed by IBM, the American tech giant, it’s able to spot patterns, networks and hotspots based on what it describes as one of the largest collections of available trafficking information. Over 200 organisations and 500 users have access, having used the information to uncover Vietnamese nationals being trafficked to work in Cambodian scam centres, for example, or networks of fake job agencies in Uganda.

Much of the initial technology focused on combating trafficking, says Mazumder. Traffic Jam, an AI software, trawls hundreds of thousands of online ads selling sex – some of which will be profiles advertising trafficked individuals – and analyzes the data. Used by law enforcement agencies across Europe and North and South America, its developers say it has allowed cases to be built in months rather than years. 

The problem is, many of those ads are also posts from genuine sex workers – and tools using this kind of software can struggle to reliably discern between the two. 

Spotlight is another tool that scrapes sex advertisements. Owned by Thorn, a U.S. nonprofit founded by actors Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore (Kutcher resigned in 2023), its aim is to fight child exploitation. Details such as names, numbers, images and payments details are gathered and put into a giant database. Think of it as a vast Google search, widely used by U.S. law enforcement when looking for suspected trafficking victims. 

Yet reporting by Forbes found Spotlight harvested ads from genuine sex workers, often without their knowledge, alongside online sex ads of exploited children. Police then used the databases to monitor women from afar and didn’t step in when they were endangered, the reporting found.

Many of these technologies, particularly in the anti-trafficking space, explicitly target sex workers, says Olivia Snow, a dominatrix and research fellow at UCLA’s Centre for Critical Internet Inquiry. 

“It’d be one thing if they were using AI to track clients or something. But they never are. It’s just the workers,” says Snow. “People making AI don’t actually care about human rights issues. They care about making money, and they care about getting data.”

For decades, sex workers have also reported being frozen or locked out of their bank accounts, she adds. Again, genuine sex work can involve transactions seen as trafficking ‘indicators’, such as depositing cash at certain ATMs and times of the day. Snow suspects the reason why she’s unable to send money from her bank account is connected to her work, though she won’t ever know for sure.

“They’ve definitely figured something out,” she explains. “It is so dystopian.”

Jennings from Santander acknowledges their AI tool alone can’t determine what is genuine and or not, rather it flags activity it deems unusual. What’s important, he says, is the human element. After alerts are generated, a team of roughly 17 people analyse the data, taking a holistic view of the customer to understand if the transactions make sense. “We’re [thinking]: ‘does this add up?’” says Jennings. “It’s the combination of the two things which is very, very powerful.”

The technology is best thought of as an indicator of something potentially risky, says Mazumder from The Alan Turing Institute. But that risk needs further investigation, likely offline and in-person. She also cautions gaps and bias in modern slavery data need addressing. One model from 2016 trained on sex advert websites, for example, learned that the phrase “Asian” indicates sex trafficking. 

Others point out tools are often funded by big tech and built for law enforcement. If the industry cared about helping survivors, they’d involve them in the process, says Sabra Boyd, a Seattle-based writer and trafficking survivor. 

The results can be significant — as the Santander example shows. But Mazumder says it is vital that mechanisms are in place to ensure marginalized or vulnerable groups aren’t targeted, further exploited or harmed in some way. 

Boyd sums it up: “nothing about us, without us”. A powerful motto of the disability rights movement for decades, for her it feels as relevant as ever.

“Who gets to build these products?” she asks. “Who gets to define what safety is for me as a trafficking survivor?”

NAIROBI—Last September, Ugandan Olympian Rebecca Cheptegei lost her life in Kenya at the hands of an intimate partner.

Cheptegei’s partner, Dickson Ndiema, poured petrol on her and set her on fire during a disagreement at their home. Her mother, Agnes, had dreaded this moment for years.

“This wasn’t the first time our daughter suffered at his hands,” Agnes Cheptegei said, her voice trembling.

Cheptegei’s tragic death took place barely seven months after more than 10,000 women took to the streets of Nairobi to protest femicide, the killing of women. The January 2024 protests, which spread throughout the country, led to a flurry of commitments from Kenyan President William Ruto’s government, such as establishing a dedicated police unit for femicide cases, fast-tracking judicial proceedings, and supporting shelters for survivors of gender-based violence. Femicide cases in Kenya have risen in the last year, however, making 2024 one of the deadliest years on record for Kenyan women.

Activists claim the government said the right things at the time, but it has failed to back up its words with action.

“It has been a year of empty promises,” said Njeri Migwi, co-founder of Usikimye, a Nairobi-based organization dedicated to supporting survivors of sexual and gender-based violence.

The crisis in Kenya mirrors a grim global reality. Despite decades of activism against gender-based violence, femicide is a problem that refuses to go away. A United Nations report released last year shows that 85,000 women and girls around the world were killed in 2023. Of that, 51,100 were murdered by an intimate partner or family member, amounting to 140 deaths daily. Africa recorded the highest rates of intimate partner and family-related femicide, followed by the Americas and Oceania.

This has led to a global push by activists to formally recognize femicide as a standalone crime, emphasizing the urgent need for justice and accountability. In 2007, Costa Rica became the first country to legally define femicide as a distinct crime. Since then, countries like Croatia and Cyprus have followed suit, integrating femicide into their criminal codes. The Federation of Women Lawyers-Kenya (FIDA-Kenya) and Amnesty International are calling for Kenya’s government to do the same.

Ruto’s administration looks to be following South Africa’s lead instead, setting up a task force to come up with legislative and policy responses to gender-based violence, including femicide. But frustrated activists are pushing for the government to take more concrete steps. 

“In the last year, femicide cases surged, while the government’s response was reactionary at best. As women, it felt like we were left to fend for ourselves,” Migwi said.

Families who have lost loved ones to femicide have seen their grief compounded by a sluggish justice system that offers neither solace nor answers.

Lucy Njeri, a member of parliament from Kirinyaga County, is consumed by bitterness over the fruitlessness of her fight for justice for her slain 23-year-old daughter, Seth Nyakio. Njeri said Nyakio was strangled by her ex-boyfriend in October 2024, yet he has not been arrested.

“Even after identifying myself as Nyakio’s mother, so much was hidden from me,” Njeri said, her voice heavy with emotion. “I have never been given the full details for her murder case, despite asking for it repeatedly. The initial investigations were riddled with gaps and cover-ups. I am bitter. How can I mourn my daughter while her murderer is out here free? Is that fair?”

The first time Cheptegei was abused by her partner, she went to the police. According to her mother, Cheptegei was so disheartened by their inaction that she refused to report any future attacks.

Data on femicide is often incomplete due to underreporting, but there is a clear trend showing that Kenyan women are increasingly being killed by intimate partners, family members, or strangers. Recent police data, which showed that almost 100 women were killed in just the three months between last August and October, suggests that 2024 could have been the worst year on record for femicides in Kenya.

“Enough is enough,” said Christine Kung’u, the chairperson of FIDA-Kenya. “The state’s unresponsiveness over the rise in femicide cases is unacceptable.”

Some families have been seeking justice for years. For Rose Nduta, her grief today remains as raw as the day her daughter Purity Wangeci was taken from her in 2022. Wangeci, a vibrant young woman who dreamed of becoming a journalist, was brutally murdered by her boyfriend just eight months after starting college. 

“Life without her feels empty and meaningless,” Nduta said from her Nairobi home. “We were so close. We loved each other so much. Nightmares of her haunt me even now. The image of her lifeless body lying in a thicket is etched in my mind—it never leaves me.”

Nduta said she has endured an agonizingly slow legal process. While the suspects were arrested and arraigned, progress has still been painfully lethargic. 

“Since the case started, only two hearings have taken place,” she explained. “The next hearing is scheduled for this coming June. It feels like an eternity.”

Kenya seems to be using South Africa as a model for tackling the femicide crisis.

In 2018, South African women rallied under the #TheTotalShutdown movement amid a surge in femicide cases. They pressured President Cyril Ramaphosa into convening the country’s first presidential summit on ending gender-based violence and femicide. This momentum culminated in legislative reforms, such as the establishment of the Ministry for Women, Youth, and Persons with Disabilities, and the creation of a national strategic plan on gender-based violence and femicide—a crisis that Ramaphosa called a “second pandemic.”

The results in South Africa have been a mixed bag. Last May, Ramaphosa signed a bill to establish the National Council on Gender-Based Violence and Femicide, tasked with implementing the strategic plan and allocating resources to policies and programs aimed at ending femicide and gender-based violence.

But last November, the South African Medical Research Council’s Gender and Health Research Unit revealed a troubling trend: The number of murders of women reported to police has been on the rise since 2020/21, with intimate-partner femicide as the primary driver of the increase. It is unclear whether it is at least partly due to a rise in reporting of these crimes due to increased awareness.

With Kenya now taking its cues from South Africa on addressing gender-based violence, activists are calling on Ruto’s government to move boldly. Ruto’s task force is expected to present actionable recommendations by April 10, and feminists want to make sure the group is given the time and resources to do its job right.

“The 90-day period set for the working group is simply not enough to effectively address the complex mandate they’ve been given,” said Evelyne Opondo, Africa director at the International Center for Research on Women. Despite the tight timeline, Opondo acknowledged that the formation of the task force is a significant step forward.

Women activists are also urging the task force to adopt a more intersectional approach that develops targeted interventions for marginalized groups, including refugees, people with disabilities, and those living in conflict-affected areas.

More ambitiously, FIDA-Kenya and other activists are calling for Ruto to declare femicide as its own distinct crime, an action which they say would help address the patriarchal dynamics that lead to femicide and an unresponsive justice system.

“We need femicide to be recognized as a standalone crime, separate from murder,” said Martha Odero, a Nairobi-based activist. “The government’s policies and existing laws are barely effective or deterrent enough.”

Nduta said her fight for justice for her daughter is not just personal but also a reminder of the human cost of a system that repeatedly fails survivors and their families.

“I don’t want another mother to experience what I’m going through,” she said. “Wangeci had so much life ahead of her. She didn’t deserve this. No woman does.”

*Kamau Maichuhie is a reporter with The Nation based in Nairobi, Kenya.

DHAKA: The turning point came at midnight, when women hit the streets.

By mid-July, Bangladeshi university students had been protesting for over a month for the reform of government job quotas, which they said created a nepotistic patronage system that rewarded supporters of the ruling Awami League. But few predicted they would bring down Sheikh Hasina, who had ruled Bangladesh for 15 years with an iron fist. 

Then, on July 14, Hasina called the protesters “Razakars” — a term for an anti-independence paramilitary force that has become synonymous with “traitor”. Women students, who broadly supported the anti-quota movement, took the remark personally. 

That midnight, thousands of residents of the girls’ dorms in Dhaka University flooded out of their halls, defiantly shouting “Who are you? Who am I? Razakar! Razakar!” 

The residents of the boys’ dorms joined them and within 48 hours, the uprising had spread throughout the country. In less than a month, Hasina was on a helicopter, fleeing to India.

“It’s because of women that this movement became a people’s revolution,” says Maliha Namla, an organizer at Jahangirnagar University. “Without them, it would not have become one so quickly.”

From July 15 to Aug 5, the Gen Z revolution that led to the fall of Hasina saw the most widespread participation of women in street protests in Bangladesh’s history. Women armed with sticks and stones clashing with police and Awami League enforcers became iconic images of the protests. They led marches, blockaded key intersections, and were heavily involved in organizing and decision-making as student coordinators. After Hasina fled and the country briefly plunged into a state of anarchy, with police on strike, women students stayed out on the streets alongside the men as they guided traffic and conducted night patrols.

“It was unprecedented, and so invigorating and so inspiring,” says Shireen Huq, the chair of Bangladesh’s interim government’s Women’s Affairs Reform Commission. “The disappointing part is that once it was all over, the women [students] disappeared. They were not to be seen in any serious decision-making.”

The student movement itself did not disappear. Three students have been appointed as advisers in the interim government — all three are men. Students have continued to stage protests and campaign against Hasina loyalists, most notably forcing the Chief Justice to resign. They’re conducting a grassroots outreach program to raise awareness of the July uprising, and there are widespread rumors that they have plans to start their own political party.

But the movement has splintered in the aftermath of its success.

“Bit by bit, our group became many groups,” says Namla. “Everyone had a different ideology or approach about how to move forward. The atmosphere became very toxic. And as the movement became divided, women’s participation began to drop.”

When the protests first started in early June, the number of women taking part was fairly low. Umama Fatema, a molecular biology student at Dhaka University, remembers brainstorming with the other women she met at the protests about how to get more involved. They set up a WhatsApp group, and then a Messenger group, and started trying to drum up support for their cause. Soon, they were turning out hundreds, and eventually thousands, of women.

“I’d post things that were meant to create a sense of indignation in the girls,” Fatema laughs. “Like: ‘How can we live with this kind of insult?’ I’d write all these cliché posts.

Fatema recalls a deep sense of unity within the movement while Hasina was in power, and in its immediate aftermath. Roles and decision-making was shared and decentralized, and she says women played particularly critical roles in the Bangla Blockade, when students shut down major roads and railways throughout the country. Fatema herself became the movement’s official spokesperson.

“After the revolution, women as a community became sidelined. There’s a sense of anger among many women as a result of this,” says Fatema. “Say I make an important political point — no one pays any attention. But if a man says the same thing, people fall over themselves with applause.”

The organizers who spoke to The Fuller Project and Foreign Policy say that women have suffered as a result of their desire to keep the movement unified. As infighting grew among the students, women became more likely to take a step back in the hope of keeping the peace. One consequence has been that women have been out-jostled by men vying for leadership positions. Their public visibility has fallen sharply as the men take center-stage, and many of those who are included say they feel their purpose is to serve as the token woman.

“Women aren’t afraid of participating in student movements, being involved in politics, or standing in front of the camera,” says Nusrat Tabassum, a student leader at Dhaka University. “What women fear is that their voices, in general, are not truly heard anywhere. We have to fight men at every step, and that makes it tough.”

Last October, as criticism grew over this lack of representation, the interim government added a Women’s Affairs Reform Commission to its roster of reform committees. They placed Shireen Huq, a veteran activist and one of the founders of Naripokkho, the country’s most prominent women’s rights organization, in charge. Formed much later than most of the other commissions, Huq and her colleagues are now scrambling to get their work done in time to be able to influence the others. They see gender as a cross-cutting issue, and believe their recommendations will only work if they are integrated into the recommendations of the other committees.

“We are trying to buy time,” Huq says.

Unfortunately for Huq and her commission, time is not something the interim government can offer easily. Internally, the government is under pressure internally to hold elections in a timely manner. Meanwhile, they’ve been bombarded from the outside by a disinformation campaign led by the Awami League and their allies, especially in India, which have stoked fears of Islamist violence in the country. Hasina had presented herself as a secular leader who was the only one capable of holding fundamentalist Islam at bay, even as the religious right grew in power during her dictatorship.

“My task is going to be very, very challenging for these reasons as well,” says Huq. “Especially expat Bangladeshis are going paranoid almost — ‘Islamists are taking over’, you know? So partly they’re also being influenced by Indian propaganda. But partly they can’t come to terms with the fact that yes, in fact a lot of the fighters in the street came from religious backgrounds. 

“One of the most beautiful images I carry with me now is, the women are coming out of the student dorms, and there’s a woman in a t-shirt and blue jeans holding hands with a woman in a complete niqab. This is something my generation has not learned to come to terms with. This image made me, for the first time, come to terms with it and deal with my own prejudices about all these things.”

Fatema, whose father was once a student activist with an Islamist group before abandoning politics, says she worries both about growing Islamist presence in the halls of Dhaka University and about people looking to politicize the lack of representation of women for Islamophobic purposes.

“If you’re raising this as a political tool, I don’t support that,” says Fatema. “But it is not immaterial. Statecraft is not something that’s only for the boys to learn.”

MEXICO CITY—The details of Esmeralda’s miscarriage sent shock waves throughout Mexican society this October.

The 14-year-old Indigenous girl said she was sexually abused by a family member and hadn’t even known that she was pregnant. But instead of receiving support for what she says was a miscarriage, Esmeralda was hit with intentional homicide charges. She was facing a three-year prison sentence and the prospect of having to pay a roughly $25,000 fine to the baby’s father—her alleged abuser.

The case outraged feminists and abortion rights activists and spurred them into action. They provided legal support, conducted a media campaign, and organized protests. The local prosecutor’s office folded under the pressure, it and dropped the charges in late October.

Abortion rights are having a moment in Mexico. The country’s Supreme Court ruled in 2021 that penalizing abortion is unconstitutional, and it reaffirmed the decision in 2023. But the government has been slow to comply, and the procedure remains illegal in many localities, such as Querétaro, Esmeralda’s home state. Her case drives home a difficult reality for activists here in Mexico: Despite recent successes, they will have to maintain a powerful grassroots vigilance against a state and medical system that they can never fully trust.

“We used to have the fantasy that once abortion was legal, we were not going to be necessary,” said Verónica Cruz Sánchez, a pioneering abortion rights activist in Mexico. That fantasy has faded.

A major force in maintaining this grassroots presence is comprised of Mexico’s abortion collectives—groups mostly made up of volunteers who help provide access to abortion services. Cruz Sánchez is the director of Las Libres, or “The Free Ones,” one of the country’s first abortion collectives. The movement has proliferated rapidly since Las Libres was founded in 2000—today, researchers estimate there are 300 to 400 such groups in the country.

Abortion collectives are known for providing self-administered abortion pills—mailing mifepristone and misoprostol to women across the country—as well as guidance on how to use them. 

But many volunteers who spoke with The Fuller Project and Foreign Policy say a lot of the support they provide is emotional. The women they work with are often going through one of the most vulnerable moments of their lives—and the treatment that they receive through official channels can be insensitive, even cruel.

Paulina Córdova, who describes herself as an abortion acompañante, or abortion doula, draws from her own experiences when helping the women who choose to come to her instead of going to the hospital.

In 2018, Córdova had a miscarriage at 24 weeks. She arrived at the hospital 6 centimeters dilated, but when her contractions stopped, the doctors didn’t give her any information about what was happening. Afterward, they sat her next to other women who had just given birth. 

“I was struggling with the loss and the pain, and the woman in front of me was holding her newborn surrounded by flowers and balloons,” Córdova recalled. 

Abortion collectives exist in many parts of the world, but they have a particularly strong presence in Latin America. Here, they’ve grown with the continent’s feminist “Green Wave” movement and the medical community’s acceptance of self-administered abortion.

When she first started this work, Cruz Sánchez would match women seeking abortions with doctors who were willing to provide them. One day, one of the gynecologists whom she worked with came back from a conference abroad and said: “Vero, I learned to do abortions with medicine.” 

Cruz Sánchez started reading up on the World Health Organization’s protocols and realized that she didn’t need doctors anymore. She and her peers would train women on using the pills, and they would go on to teach others.

But the stigma around abortion pills took a long time to go away. For decades, the medical community had emphasized the importance of supervised abortions and warned against clandestine procedures. In Mexico City, first-trimester abortion has been legal since 2007, but guidance stipulated that the procedure had to be done in a clinical setting. 

The stigma contributed to the collectives operating in relative secrecy at first—and so did the fact that abortion had been illegal in almost all of Latin America until the 2010s. Organizers wouldn’t publicize the information on how to use abortion pills and would instead talk up the dangers of clandestine abortions. 

Cruz Sánchez remembers that feminists would scold her for talking too openly about abortion. But she wouldn’t listen, and she kept training more women. While some organizations recommended that acompañantes never provide their real names or numbers while working, she did not heed their caution. “She said, ‘let’s stop this nonsense. Why won’t you share your name? If we don’t think this is a crime, why are we acting like it is?,” said Ninde MolRe, the president of Abortistas, another abortion collective, while discussing Cruz Sánchez 

Gradually, that attitude of secrecy began to change. Other organizations, such as Fondo María in Mexico City, realized that the stigma was hurting women and started talking about abortion as something that could be hard, but also liberating and transformative.

Their work received a further boost from the Green Wave movement. The massive protests organized by Argentinian women in 2018 to demand legal abortion inspired women across Latin America, and Mexico was no exception. The green bandanas worn by Argentinian protesters spread around Mexico like wildfire. Every time that Esmeralda’s lawyer appeared on television, she wore a green bandana on her left hand or neck.

The emboldened movement has made enormous progress in recent years, especially at the federal level. The ground reality is messier—roughly half of Mexico’s 32 states have legalized abortion, meaning that abortion collectives have to navigate a patchwork of conflicting rules, similar to the situation in the United States. 

In the process, the collectives have found themselves negotiating an uneasy relationship with the state—part parallel service provider, part watchdog.

For instance, informal abortion providers have long been an open secret in the state of Chiapas, where the local government has been happy to look the other way because they were helping curb the state’s maternal mortality rate, according to Suzanne Veldhuis, a medical doctor and researcher who focuses on abortion collectives.

Sandra Cardona, who heads a collective called Necesito Abortar, or “I need an abortion,” lives in Nuevo León, a state where abortion is only legal in cases of rape, incest, and situations where the mother’s life is at risk. There, pro-choice doctors refer women to her when they need access to abortion services. But Necesito Abortar also provides services to women in states such as Oaxaca, where abortion has been legal since 2019. 

“Women prefer having their abortions with us since they [doctors] treat them so badly,” Cardona said.

The widespread mistreatment of women seeking abortions has led some collectives to take on more of a monitoring role. In Hidalgo, where first-trimester abortion was legalized in 2021, the Diramona collective created an abortion hotline through which organizers refer people to local public hospitals and keep an eye on the outcomes— according to data shared by the collective with Foreign Policy and The Fuller Project, 86 percent of the abortions performed in Hidalgo public hospitals this year were referred by them.

Mexican activists are drawing inspiration not just from collectives flourishing across the country and throughout Latin America, but also from historical examples. A few years ago, MolRe saw a documentary about the Jane Collective, an underground abortion service that operated in Chicago in the 1970s. Several of its members were eventually arrested, but the charges were dropped after the Supreme Court passed its Roe v. Wade decision in 1973. 

While Roe—overturned in June 2022—was widely seen for many years as a landmark victory for abortion access, MolRe felt oddly sorry about the fate of the collective. She was sad about the structure that it had, which was lost once abortion became legal and the movement lost its momentum.

For MolRe, the lesson to be drawn from the Jane Collective’s story is clear—Mexican collectives will keep demanding abortion access from the state, but that won’t stop them from providing it themselves.

Right-wing American Christian groups that oppose sexual and reproductive rights are significantly increasing their spending in Africa, according to a new data analysis published ahead of a U.S. election, which could prove pivotal to abortion access both inside and outside the country.

Research by the nonprofit Institute for Journalism and Social Change (IJSC) found that 17 groups increased their Africa spending by 50% between 2019 and 2022, the most recent year for which data is available. The researchers say the data represents only a handful of Christian Right groups but indicates that they are making an increasingly concerted effort to influence abortion policy internationally as well as domestically.

A 2020 investigation by openDemocracy revealed that $54 million dollars flowed from mostly the same U.S. Christian Right organizations to Africa between 2008 and 2018. In Africa, their activities range from helping like-minded politicians obstruct key reproductive health legislation to supporting domestic groups in their fight against progressive abortion-related court rulings—tactics borrowed from the anti-abortion playbook in the United States.

While abortion laws have slowly liberalized across the continent, reproductive rights advocates say campaigning by American right-wing groups that brand themselves as “pro-family” could reverse those changes.

“The work of these groups has multifaceted effects on the continent,” said Martin Onyango, Associate Director for Legal Strategies in Africa at the Center for Reproductive Rights, a U.S.-based advocacy group. “We have seen a proliferation of anti-rights legislation on the continent of Africa, from Ghana to Uganda to Kenya to Malawi. We have groups that are now proposing legislation in parliament to take away fundamental rights—access to reproductive health care—that have been in place on the continents for decades.”

Many of the groups named in the report have close ties to former President Donald Trump and his administration and have influenced Trump on reproductive rights issues. Several are on the advisory board for Project 2025, a set of policy proposals seen as the probable playbook for a second Trump term.

American anti-abortion groups have campaigned in Africa for decades in tandem with their fight at home. Bolstered by conservative Republican politicians, the 1973 Helms Amendment, which limits the use of U.S. foreign aid for abortion, was passed after the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade ruling. President Ronald Reagan then enacted the Mexico City policy, known as the global gag rule, which restricts U.S. funding to any international organization that provides, or even counsels on, abortion. The U.S. Christian Right has found Africa, with its strong tradition of Evangelical Christianity, fertile ground for further promoting and spreading its ideology. The result is a global movement that unites anti-abortion groups, religious leaders, and politicians around a common goal: eliminating the right to safe, legal abortion services worldwide.

Despite some liberalization, abortion remains highly restricted in many African countries. As of 2022, abortion was essentially illegal in six African countries and permitted only to save the life of the mother in another 13 countries.

Research has shown that banning abortions increases maternal mortality due to unsafe abortions. As of 2019, sub-Saharan Africa had the highest abortion case-fatality rate of any world region, at roughly 185 deaths per 100,000 abortions, a total of 15,000 preventable deaths every year.

Uganda’s Penal Code prohibits abortion except to save the mother’s life. In 2015, the Ministry of Health approved standards and guidelines on the provision of safe abortion, but those were quickly withdrawn. Onyango says this was partly due to lobbying by right-wing groups, including Family Watch International (FWI), a fundamentalist Arizona-based Christian organization whose spending in Africa increased nearly five-fold from 2019 to 2022.

Court cases challenging the withdrawal of those guidelines have not yet been heard, says Onyango.

“When they’re set for hearing, the bench is quickly reconstituted and the exercise starts again from ground zero,” he said. “And it is not by default. It is by clear design that that conversation is not intended to be concluded.”

According to reproductive rights advocates, American right-wing groups are playing the long game in Africa.

“Kenya, Uganda, Ghana appear to be the epicenter of a lot of anti-rights action, and that is where they build a lot of their strategy before exporting them to other countries… When they leave Kenya, they go down to Malawi, and they replicate the same actions,” said Onyango.

Abortion was illegal in Kenya until 2010, when a new constitution permitted the procedure in a handful of circumstances, including during emergencies or if the life or health of the mother is in danger. Subsequent court decisions allowed abortions in cases of rape and incest and expanded the definition of “health” to include mental health.

But access remains limited, and studies have shown that most Kenyans have limited or inaccurate knowledge of their country’s abortion laws and policies. The legal landscape is confusing, even for medical providers who hesitate to perform the procedure to avoid criminal prosecution.

Ever since Roe v. Wade was overturned in the United States in 2022, reproductive rights advocates have worried that the same thing could happen in Kenya.

“We export a lot of our values and cultures from the United States, so the Roe v. Wade decision was completely misinterpreted here, because in our setting what we got was that abortion has been made illegal in the United States. That’s the message that we got because Roe was overturned,” said Dr. Ernest Nyamato, associate director of quality of care at the reproductive health care nonprofit IPAS.

In Kenya, a conservative group called the Kenya Christian Professionals Forum (KCPF) is appealing two recent court decisions: one affirming that abortion is a fundamental constitutional right, making the arrest of patients and providers illegal, and a second upholding the constitutional right to access abortion when there is a risk to the pregnant person’s health.

The KCPF’s chairperson, Charles Kanjama, denies receiving funding from any American organizations. But its annual report shows that its parent organization, the African Christian Professionals Forum (ACPF), was sponsored in 2023 by FWI. That same year, FWI’s president, Sharon Slater, was a featured speaker at ACPF’s annual conference.

FWI said it was unable to provide comment on this story within the requested time frame.

Part of the challenge of tracking the funding flows is a lack of transparent documentation. “We’re treating what we found as the tip of the iceberg,” said Claire Provost, co-founder of the IJSC. “We didn’t capture all funding from U.S. anti-rights actors into Africa. It’s a diverse and evolving ecosystem, with new organizations being set up all the time.”

The influence of these groups is clearly visible. Their members share training materials with African organizations, travel to the continent for conferences, and sponsor events such as Kenya’s March for Life, an annual demonstration against abortion, says Saoyo Tabitha Griffith, a Kenyan lawyer and women’s rights advocate.

In 2019, Nairobi hosted the ICPD25, a global population and development conference. Across the street from the venue, a few hundred people gathered in opposition to sexual and reproductive rights, including several groups tracked by the IJSC.

Former Trump administration delegates, including Valerie Huber, who was U.S. special representative for Global Women’s Health, were also there. Huber was a chief architect of the Geneva Consensus Declaration, a document submitted by the United States to the United Nations that encourages governments to improve women’s health care without abortion. She now travels across Africa promoting anti-abortion ideology for her nonprofit, the Institute for Women’s Health (IWH), another Project 2025 sponsor.

In a statement, an IWH spokesperson wrote that no IWH funds had been spent in Africa, other than for routine travel expenses, and that IWH has not provided any grants to African groups or individuals, is not partnering in Kenya, and has no plans to increase spending in Africa.

Huber hopes “to improve health and thriving for women, their children, their families, and their communities through high-quality, research-based policy guidance to nations,” the spokesperson wrote.

America’s global abortion policy seesaws back and forth depending on which party holds office, and Griffith said she witnessed years of damaging changes during Trump’s presidency. “I do not think I want to even imagine what a Trump reelection would mean for the women of Kenya,” she said.

*Additional reporting support provided by the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting.

Less than two weeks before his 2020 election defeat, then-President Donald Trump’s administration rolled out a document that purported to promote women’s health and rights while declaring that there was “no international right to abortion.” 

“It’s the first time that a multilateral coalition has been built around the issue of defending life,” then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said at a signing ceremony, conducted virtually because of the coronavirus pandemic. Brazil, Egypt, Hungary, Indonesia, and Uganda joined the United States in sponsoring the nonbinding directive, called the Geneva Consensus Declaration on Promoting Women’s Health and Strengthening the Family. Another 28 countries, many with authoritarian governments that repress women’s rights, signed it.

Abortion is one of the most pivotal issues that will determine whether Trump returns to the Oval Office. The Republican nominee routinely brags about his role—via three Supreme Court nominations—in overturning Roe v. Wade in a 2022 ruling that inevitably limited abortion access for millions of people in the United States. Less known is the work that Trump and his appointees did to prevent women in other countries from obtaining the procedure.

The Geneva Consensus Declaration, which encourages governments to improve women’s health care without abortion, is one slice of Trump’s work to impose anti-abortion values on people overseas. It has garnered fewer concrete results than his expansion of the Mexico City Policy, a perennial Republican rule that prevents foreign organizations that accept U.S. assistance from providing abortions or related services. But if Trump is elected, the declaration is expected to have renewed vigor. In fact, it could loom over all U.S. foreign assistance.

While the one-page document—with its emphasis on health and human rights for women—presents as nonthreatening, detractors assert that a Trump victory on Nov. 5 could make it very threatening indeed.

“I mean, sorry—to be brutal about it, women are going to die,” said Swetha Sridhar, a senior global policy research officer for Fòs Feminista, an international alliance that promotes sexual and reproductive health and justice. “That’s what we’re going to see.” 

President Joe Biden withdrew the United States from the declaration upon assuming the presidency in 2021 because, his administration said, it “promotes anti-LGBTQI sentiment and undermines women’s health.” But Washington’s rejection of a document that it produced did not kill it. The declaration has been kept alive largely through the work of one former Trump administration official, Valerie Huber, who is known as its “architect.”

Sridhar and other abortion and gender rights advocates say that the Geneva Consensus Declaration represents a long-term, conservative attempt to create new international standards grounded in faith-based views of abortion and family structures.

“It has a big impact when you have these established global norms,” said Serra Sippel, the executive director of the Brigid Alliance, which provides logistical support for people who need to travel to obtain abortions within the United States. “Anti-gender, anti-rights folks can use this consensus as a tool to try to get countries to pass laws,” Sippel added.

The effort to export anti-abortion policies to other countries did not start under Trump. The Center for Family and Human Rights (C-Fam), an organization with ties to the Catholic Church, worked for 24 years to create a declaration, said its president—Austin Ruse—in a statement issued the day of the signing ceremony. In a summation of the declaration’s principles, Ruse said: “There is no international right to abortion. There is no international obligation to fund abortion. The United Nations has no business interfering in sovereign decisions when it comes to protecting life in the womb.” 

C-Fam did not make anyone available for an interview for this story.

Huber, the declaration’s most visible proponent and a former U.S. special representative for global women’s health in the Trump administration, has spent the past few years traveling the globe, sometimes working with foreign first ladies to bring more countries on board. Huber also founded the Institute for Women’s Health, which “identifies high-impact solutions to promote women’s health and thriving,” according to its website. The institute created a framework called Protego to partner with countries that sign the declaration and provide guidance as they implement “high-impact, low-cost interventions” to meet the needs of women and their families, Huber said in two statements issued in response to an interview request.

“The tenet of the GCD [Geneva Consensus Declaration] regarding abortion points to the sovereignty of nations to chart their own path on this issue—therefore, GCD coalition nations have differing laws regarding abortion,” Huber wrote. “The GCD accurately states that abortion is not an international right, but rather it is up to the country to decide on its own abortion policies—without external pressure.”

Of course, countries already have the ability to pass and enforce their own laws on abortion. Opponents of the Geneva Consensus Declaration, however, argue that the document would allow governments to ignore international accords related to abortion, such as the Protocol to the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights on the Rights of Women in Africa, better known as the Maputo Protocol. That 2003 treaty recognizes abortion rights in cases of sexual assault, rape, incest, life-threatening fetal anomalies, and situations in which continuing a pregnancy would endanger the pregnant woman’s life or her mental and physical health. 

Nevertheless, a handful of the countries that ratified the agreement do not permit abortion under any circumstances.

“The Maputo Protocol is an African instrument for Africans, created by Africans. No external pressure,” said Kemi Akinfaderin, who leads global advocacy work for Fòs Feminista and is based in Lomé, Togo.

To date, the Geneva Consensus Declaration does not appear to have many real-world consequences for women, according to abortion rights advocates in the United States and abroad. It is not an official treaty and, therefore, has no teeth. It also has had no consistent overseer, the secretariat having been passed from the United States to Brazil and then, after new leaders emerged in those countries, to Hungary.

But its trajectory—and implications for women worldwide—could change rapidly if Trump wins a second presidential term in the Nov. 5 election, abortion rights advocates told The Fuller Project and Foreign Policy. 

Trump, who has courted abortion opponents in his three presidential runs, has pledged to rejoin the coalition that signed the declaration, now numbering 39 countries (despite withdrawals from Brazil, Colombia, and the United States). In addition, Project 2025, a document seen by many in the United States as the blueprint for a new conservative presidency, proposes that U.S. foreign policy should align with the declaration’s tenets on abortion and the family. 

“As soon as the next president is elected, we will reveal our priorities for the next four years,” Huber said in her statement.

For women in some of the world’s poorest countries, a return of Trump could signal real danger, according to abortion rights advocates in the U.S. and abroad.

Sridhar, who is based in Mumbai, might sound hyperbolic when she predicts an increase in deaths, but her fear is based on Trump’s track record. During his four-year term, he greatly expanded the Mexico City Policy, forcing medical providers that received U.S. money to make a choice: Either they stopped providing abortions and related services, such as counseling or referrals—even if they were subsidized by non-U.S. money—or they lost what was often the bulk of their funding. Many clinics that provided a full array of services, including HIV/AIDS testing and treatment, closed.

A report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences estimated that Trump’s reinstatement and expansion of the policy between 2017 and 2021 led to 108,000 maternal and child deaths and 360,000 new HIV infections.

Project 2025, which was drafted by the conservative Heritage Foundation think tank with the help of Trump administration alumni, including Huber, would expand the Mexico City Policy considerably further. Starting with former President Ronald Reagan in 1984, every Republican president has invoked the policy, dubbed the “global gag rule” by opponents, and applied it to foreign assistance for family planning services. (Every Democratic president has rescinded the policy.) 

Trump extended it to all health care aid and changed the policy’s name to the “Protecting Life in Global Health Assistance.” Project 2025 would extend the practice to apply it to all foreign assistance, including humanitarian aid.

Layered on top of that would be the Geneva Consensus Declaration. Project 2025 proposes applying the anti-abortion, pro-family doctrine not only to foreign nongovernmental organizations and governments, but also to large international organizations such as the United Nations and the World Health Organization (WHO), which have programs that support reproductive rights and health.

Lynn Morgan, a professor emeritus of anthropology at Mount Holyoke College and an expert on the declaration, said that Trump could use it to undermine the work of U.N. agencies and the WHO, which sets international standards for health care.

“It’s going to empower a coalition of countries who might want to say, ‘We don’t want to participate in the World Health Organization anymore. We’re going to stop funding the World Health Organization because of their advocacy around abortion,’” Morgan said.

The declaration would gain potency if Trump made it a condition of foreign assistance, said Gillian Kane, the director of policy and advocacy at Ipas, an international organization that supports access to contraception and abortion. “I think what the Trump administration could do is say, ‘Hey, if you don’t sign onto this, or if you sign off of this, you’re not going to get foreign aid,’” Kane said. “I think this can be a real cudgel and sort of force people to align to this ideology.”

Huber said in her statement that no matter who becomes president, the Institute of Women’s Health seeks to build consensus. “We don’t want anything to stand in the way of improved health and wellbeing for women and families,” she wrote.

But it’s difficult to fathom Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee, working with Huber and other proponents of the declaration. Harris has been outspoken in her support of abortion rights, and advocates say that they hope she will go further than Biden has to promote access abroad. 

Although Biden rescinded Trump’s version of the Mexico City Policy and withdrew from the Geneva Consensus Declaration, abortion rights advocates said his administration was slow to communicate with foreign aid recipients. Akinfaderin, of Fòs Feminista, said that some U.S. agencies were implementing Trump’s restrictions well into Biden’s term.

Akinfaderin said that she would like a Harris administration to view reproductive rights and justice “more holistically” to include such issues as infertility, comprehensive sex education, and maternal mortality. And, she said, Harris should stop conservatives from “rolling back everything that we’ve done—every single thing that we’ve done.”

Beirne Roose-Snyder, the director of the Preclusion Project, an independent legal organization that supports gender rights, said that supporters of abortion and gender rights would relish working with a President Harris, whom she described as “a very public advocate on reproductive rights and sexual orientation and gender identity.”

“This is not someone who is going to take to the creation of fake documents particularly well,” Roose-Snyder said in reference to the declaration. “So I think we would expect to see continued distance and maybe even further engagement with other countries about diminishing the role and power of the future of the Geneva Consensus Declaration. I think we’d expect to see that.”

MYKOLAIV, UKRAINE—Kateryna Nahorna is getting ready to find trouble. 

Part of an all-female team of dog handlers, the 22-year-old is training Ukraine’s technical survey dogs—Belgian Malinois that have learned to sniff out explosives.

The job is huge. Ukraine is now estimated to be the most heavily mined country on Earth. Deminers must survey every area that saw sustained fighting for unexploded mines, missiles, artillery shells, bombs, and a host of other ordnance—almost 25 percent of the country, according to government estimates.

The dogs can cover 1,500 square meters a day. In contrast, human deminers cover 10 square meters a day on average—by quickly narrowing down the areas that manual deminers will need to tackle, the dogs save valuable time.

“This job allows me to be a warrior for my country … but without having to kill anyone,” said Nahorna. “Our men protect us at war, and we do this to protect them at home.”

A highly practical reason drove the women’s recruitment. The specialized dog training was done in Cambodia, by the nonprofit Apopo, and military-aged men are currently not allowed to leave Ukraine.

War has shaken up gender dynamics in the Ukrainian economy, with women taking up jobs traditionally held by men, such as driving trucks or welding. Now, as mobilization ramps up once more, women are becoming increasingly important in roles that are critical for national security.

In Mykolaiv, in the industrial east, Nahorna and her dogs will soon take on one of the biggest targets of Russia’s military strategy when they start to demine the country’s energy infrastructure. Here, women have been stepping in to work in large numbers in steel mills, factories, and railways serving the front line.

It’s a big shift for Ukraine. Before the war, only 48 percent of women over age 15 took part in the workforce — one of the lowest rates in Europe. War has made collecting data on the gender composition of the workforce impossible, but today, 50,000 women serve in the Ukrainian army, compared to 30,000 before the war.

The catalyst came in 2017, years before the current war began. As conflict escalated with Russia in Crimea, the Ukrainian government overturned a Soviet-era law that had previously banned women from 450 occupations.

But obstacles still remain; for example, women are not allowed jobs the government deems too physically demanding. These barriers continue to be chipped away—most recently, women have been cleared to work in underground mines, something they were prevented from doing before.

Viktoriia Avramchuk never thought she would follow her father and husband into the coal mines for DTEK, Ukraine’s largest private energy company.

Her lifelong fear of elevators was a big factor—but there was also the fact that it was illegal for women to work underground.

Her previous job working as a nanny in a local kindergarten disappeared overnight when schools were forced to close at the beginning of the war. After a year of being unemployed, she found that she had few other options.

“I would never have taken the job if I could have afforded not to,” Avramchuk said from her home in Pokrovsk. “But I also wanted to do something to help secure victory, and this was needed.”

The demining work that Nahorna does is urgent in part because more than 55 percent of the country is farmed.

Often called “the breadbasket of Europe,” Ukraine is one of the world’s top exporters of grain. The U.K.-based Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, which has been advising the Ukrainian government on demining technology, estimates that landmines have resulted in annual GDP losses of $11 billion.

“Farmers feel the pressure to plow, which is dangerous,” said Jon Cunliffe, the Ukraine country director of Mines Advisory Group (MAG), a British nonprofit. “So we need to do as much surveying as possible to reduce the size of the possible contamination.”

The dogs can quickly clear an area of heavy vegetation, which greatly speeds up the process of releasing noncontaminated lands back to farmers. If the area is found to be unsafe, human deminers step in to clear the field manually.

“I’m not brave enough to be on the front line,” 29-year-old Iryna Manzevyta said as she slowly and diligently hovered a metal detector over a patch of farmland. “But I had to do something to help, and this seemed like a good alternative to make a difference.”

Groups like MAG are increasingly targeting women. With skilled male deminers regularly being picked up by military recruiters, recruiting women reduces the chances that expensive and time-consuming training will be invested in people who could be drafted to the front line at a moment’s notice. The demining work is expected to take decades, and women, unlike men, cannot be conscripted in Ukraine.

This urgency to recruit women is accelerating a gender shift already underway in the demining sector. Organizations like MAG have looked to recruit women as a way to empower them in local communities. Demining was once a heavily male-dominated sector, but women now make up 30 percent of workers in Vietnam and Colombia, around 40 percent in Cambodia, and more than 50 percent in Myanmar.

In Ukraine, the idea is to make demining an enterprise with “very little expat footprint,” and Cunliffe said that will only be possible by recruiting more women.

“We should not be here in 10 years. Not like in Iraq or South Sudan, where we have been for 30 years, or Vietnam, or Laos,” Cunliffe said. “It’s common sense that we bring in as many women as we can to do that. In five to 10 years, a lot of these women are going to end up being technical field managers, the jobs that are currently being done by old former British military guys, and it will change the face of demining worldwide because they can take those skills across the world.”

Manzevyta is one of the many women whose new job has turned her family dynamics on their head. She has handed over her previous life, running a small online beauty retail site, to her husband, who—though he gripes—stays at home while she is out demining.

“Life is completely different now,” she said, giggling. “I had to teach him how to use the washing machine, which settings to use, everything around the house because I’m mostly absent now.”

More seriously, Manzevyta said that the war has likely changed many women’s career trajectories.

“I can’t imagine people who have done work like this going back and working as florists once the war is over,” she laughed.

At Kampala’s sprawling Owino market, Millicent Mukwezi opens up a bundle of second-hand clothes while her assistant keeps an eye on the buyers eagerly rifling through in search of bargains. 

Mukwezi buys the clothing from a trader in the Ugandan capital who imports them from the United States and takes them to the market to sell. She favors U.S. clothing because the quality is reliable. The prices are good too – a second-hand Adidas sweatshirt sells for 60,000 Ugandan shillings ($16), a fraction of what a new one would cost. 

“My customers return because of the quality we offer,” says Mukwezi. “Here, you can get designer clothes and brands at very reasonable prices.”

Every day, hundreds of shoppers squeeze through the narrow lanes that separate makeshift wooden stalls, eager to grab a bargain. The sprawling Owino market is one of the largest in East Africa, providing livelihoods to an estimated 100,000 people, 70 percent of them women.

Owino is just one of the many markets for secondhand clothing—known locally as mitumba—that exist across East Africa. It’s a trade that allows wealthier, mostly Western countries to export discarded clothing that might otherwise end up in landfills and provides livelihoods for millions of women in the region. The Mitumba Consortium Association of Kenya, a trade body, estimates that 4.9 million people in East Africa make their living from the trade, most of them women.

But the industry faces multiple threats. Some European countries are seeking to restrict exports of used clothes amid claims they are simply exporting an environmental headache to poorer parts of the world because anything that can’t be resold ends up in landfills. Mukwezi confirms this, saying she prefers clothing shipments from the United States because she can sell everything. When she gets shipments from China, she said, “you find you can’t sell half of it. You either have to find a way to dispose of it or give it away—and that’s not good business.”

She may find herself having to source from other countries soon though. The Owino traders all complained that the cost of U.S. consignments has risen since January, when Washington ended a preferential trade agreement over Uganda’s widely criticized crackdown on homosexuality. The African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) aims to boost sub-Saharan African nations’ economies by providing duty-free access to the U.S. market and requires that those countries allow unrestricted access for U.S. imports. Economists say the Ugandan government used the country’s removal from AGOA to increase tariffs on used clothing imports—a charge the government denied when contacted. But the Uganda Dealers in Used Clothing and Shoes Association, a trade body, said rates had gone up by 3 cents a kilo in January, an increase that was driving some out of business. “We are seeing most of our members drop off,” said Lydia Ndagire, the association’s vice chair.

Francis Walugembe, an economist at the Kampala-based public policy research firm Atlas Consultants, said the apparent move to increase taxes “was retaliatory,” adding that “its timing, coupled with statements against the sector by state officials immediately after the U.S. announced its intended action on AGOA, shows a coordinated effort.”

Uganda is not the only country in the region to see secondhand clothing imports from the United States—the world’s largest exporter of used clothing, with sales of more than $950 million in 2022—as damaging to local garment manufacturing. In 2015, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania, and Uganda pushed for a ban on secondhand clothes through the East African Community, a trade bloc. Kenya rowed back after Washington threatened to respond by removing the country from AGOA, which would have hit its clothing exports. Uganda and Tanzania subsequently followed suit under pressure from the Secondary Materials and Recycled Textiles Association, a powerful lobby that represents 130 traders in the United States and Canada. Only Rwanda went ahead with a ban—a move that left thousands of women in the secondhand clothing sector jobless, according to the Rwandan Small-Scale Traders’ Association.

For Fred Muhumuza, a development economist based in Kampala, AGOA has become more about politics than trade. Last year, Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni again said he would issue a ban on imports of used clothing, though the threat was not carried out.

“Small-scale traders are a pawn in the trade wars between African governments and Washington,” Muhumuza said. “We have seen a tit-for-tat between governments on policy issues, but sadly, it is these small traders who suffer losses or must adapt to punitive policy changes that make their livelihoods harder.”

U.S. officials in Washington and Kampala did not respond to requests for comment.

On the supply side, there are also challenges ahead. France, Denmark, and Sweden proposed this year that the European Union restrict exports of used clothes, arguing that the bloc needs to do more to recycle them at home rather than exporting the problem of disposing them to African countries. “Africa must no longer be the dustbin of fast-fashion,” France’s environment ministry told Reuters.

Teresia Wairimu, the chairperson of the Mitumba Consortium Association of Kenya, warned that such a move would hurt millions of Kenyan women who depend on the trade. Kenya imported $202 million worth of used clothes in 2021 more than any other African country, according to data tracked by the United Nations.

Back in Kampala, the used-clothes sellers may not always follow the diplomatic wranglings that are impacting their lives. But they are clear on one thing: The clothes they buy have suddenly gotten more expensive, and that’s hitting their profits hard.

Susan Wamambiri, whose name has been changed at her request, is selling off the last of the secondhand clothing she and her partners bought from the United States before prices shot up. Her frustration audible, the 37-year-old accuses Uganda’s government of trying to put used-clothes sellers like her out of business.

“From January, we’ve had to pay taxes more per kilo, which is unfair,” she said. “Our association says this is the state’s way of retaliating against what the U.S. has done over homosexuality laws. They are trying to put us out of business in favor of new clothes. Where are we supposed to make a living?”

Betty Ndagire contributed additional reporting.

Nasir Mansoor has spent 40 years fighting for Pakistan’s workers. Whether demanding compensation on behalf of the hundreds of people who died in a devastating 2012 factory fire in Karachi or demonstrating against Pakistani suppliers to global fashion brands violating minimum wage rules, he’s battled many of the country’s widespread labor injustices.

Yet so far, little has improved, said Mansoor, who heads Pakistan’s National Trade Union Federation in Karachi. Despite spending most of his time dealing with issues in the country’s garment sector, labor laws are still routinely flouted inside factories. Not even European Union trade schemes such as the Generalized Scheme of Preferences—which benefits developing countries such as Pakistan but requires them to comply with international conventions on labor rights—have helped curb violations in an industry notorious for them. Regulations and trade protocols look good on paper, but they rarely trickle down to the factory level. “Nobody cares,” Mansoor said. “Not the government who makes commitments, not the brands, and not the suppliers. The workers are suffering.”

But change might finally be on the horizon after Germany’s new Supply Chain Act came into force last year. As Europe’s largest economy and importer of clothing, Germany now requires certain companies to put risk-management systems in place to prevent, minimize, and eliminate human rights violations for workers across their entire global value chains. Signed into law by German Chancellor Olaf Scholz in January 2023, the law covers issues such as forced labor, union-busting, and inadequate wages, for the first time giving legal power to protections that were previously based on voluntary commitments. Companies that violate the rules face fines of up to 8 million euros ($8.7 million).

For decades, Western companies based in countries with highly paid workers and strong labor protections have sourced from low-income countries where such laws don’t exist or are weakly enforced. While this business model cuts costs, it’s made it incredibly difficult for workers to seek justice when problems arise. Given the garment sector’s long history of poor labor conditions—whose victims are a predominantly female workforce—rights groups say the industry will feel some of the highest impacts of new due diligence laws such as Germany’s.

Until now, promises made by fashion brands to safeguard workers stitching clothes in factories around the world have been largely voluntary and poorly monitored. If the promises failed or fell short and that information became public, the main fallout was reputational damage. As governments come to realize that a purely voluntary regimen produces limited results, there is now a growing global movement to ensure that companies are legally required to protect the people working at all stages of their supply chains.

The German law is just the latest example of these new due diligence rules—and it’s the one with the highest impact, given the size of the country’s market. A number of other Western countries have also adopted similar legislation in recent years, including France and Norway. A landmark European Union law that would mandate all member states to implement similar regulation is in the final stages of being greenlighted.

Although the United States has legislation to prevent forced labor in its global supply chains, such as the 2021 Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, there are no federal laws that protect workers in other countries from abuses that fall short of forced labor. That said, a proposed New York state bill, the Fashion Act, would legally require most major U.S. and international brands to identify, prevent, and remediate human rights violations in their supply chain if passed, with noncompliance subject to fines. Since major fashion brands could hardly avoid selling their products in New York, the law would effectively put the United States on a similar legal level as Germany and France.

Abuses in textile manufacturing have been well documented. Horror stories about brutal violence or building collapses make the news when there’s a major incident, but every day, members of a predominantly female workforce live on low wages, work long hours, and endure irregular contracts. Trade unions, when they are allowed, are often unable to protect workers. A decade ago, the European Parliament described the conditions of garment workers in Asia as “slave labour.”

As of January, Germany’s new law applies to any company with at least 1,000 employees in the country, which covers many of the world’s best-known fast fashion retailers, such as Zara and Primark. Since last January, German authorities say they have received 71 complaints or notices of violations and conducted 650 of their own assessments, including evaluating companies’ risk management.

In Pakistan, the very existence of the German law was enough to spark action. Last year, Mansoor and other union representatives reached out to fashion brands that sourced some of their clothing in Pakistan to raise concerns about severe labor violations in garment factories. Just four months later, he and his colleagues found themselves in face-to-face meetings with several of those brands—a first in his 40-year career. “This is a big achievement,” he said. “Otherwise, [the brands] never sit with us. Even when the workers died in the factory fire, the brand never sat with us.”

Nearly 12 years on from the 2012 fire, which killed more than 250 people, violations are still rife for Pakistan’s 4.4 million garment sector workers, who produce for many of the major global brands. Several of these violations were highlighted in research conducted by FEMNET, a German women’s rights nonprofit, and the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR), a Berlin-based nongovernmental organization, into how companies covered by the Supply Chain Act were implementing their due diligence obligations in Pakistan. With the help of Mansoor and Zehra Khan, the general secretary of the Home-Based Women Workers Federation, interviews with more than 350 garment workers revealed the severity of long-known issues.

Nearly all workers interviewed were paid less than a living wage, which was 67,200 Pakistan rupees (roughly $243) per month in 2022, according to the Asia Floor Wage Alliance. Nearly 30 percent were even paid below the legal minimum wage of 25,000 Pakistani rupees per month (roughly $90) for unskilled workers. Almost 100 percent had not been given a written employment contract, while more than three-quarters were either not registered with the social security system—a legal requirement—or didn’t know if they were.

When Mansoor, Khan, and some of the organizations raised the violations with seven global fashion brands implicated, they were pleasantly surprised. One German retailer reacted swiftly, asking its supplier where the violations had occurred to sign a 14-point memorandum of understanding to address the issues. (We’re unable to name the companies involved because negotiations are ongoing.) The factory complied, agreeing to respect minimum wages and provide contract letters, training on labor laws, and—for the first time—worker bonuses.

In February, the factory registered an additional 400 workers with the social security system (up from roughly 100) and will continue to enroll more, according to Khan. “That is a huge number for us,” she said.

It’s had a knock-on effect, too. Four of the German brand’s other Pakistani suppliers are also willing to sign the memorandum, Khan noted, which could impact another 2,000 workers or so. “The law is opening up space for [the unions] to negotiate, to be heard, and to be taken seriously,” said Miriam Saage-Maass, the legal director at ECCHR.

After decades of issues being swept under the carpet, it’s a positive step, Mansoor said. But he’s cautious. Of the six remaining global fashion brands contacted, three are in discussions with the union, while three didn’t respond. Implementation is key, he said, particularly because there has already been pushback from some Pakistani factory owners.

Last month, EU member states finally approved a due diligence directive after long delays, during which the original draft was watered down. As it moves to the next stage—a vote in the European Parliament—before taking effect, critics argue that the rules are now too diluted and cover too few companies to be truly effective.Still, the fact that the EU is acting at all has been described as an important moment, and unionists such as Mansoor and Khan wait thousands of miles away with bated breath for the final outcome. Solidarity from Europe is important, Khan said, and could change the lives of Pakistan’s workers. “The eyes and the ears of the people are looking to [the brands],” Mansoor said. “And they are being made accountable for their mistakes.”

As Shadi prepares to become a mother for the first time, the Iranian 30-year-old is so concerned about her unborn daughter’s future that she is considering leaving her homeland.

“The challenges and inequality we face as women start from birth,” said Shadi, a housewife in Tehran, who did not give her full name for fear of persecution. “The hijab is imposed on girls from a young age, restricting their freedom in society and affecting how they grow up as well as their opportunities in life,” she added.

Iran has imposed a strict dress code on women since a revolution swept the ruling Islamic regime into power 45 years ago, obliging them to cover their hair and wear loose-fitting clothes. Authorities have stepped up enforcement of the rules since the death of Mahsa Amini in police custody in September 2022 triggered major protests across the country, during which women openly flouted the code. Last year, Iran’s parliament approved a bill to strengthen punishments for such violations.

Although the protests have subsided, the hijab has been a prominent issue ahead of the elections that will occur on first day of March for Iran’s parliament and the executive council that appoints the country’s supreme leader. Turnout is expected to be low, with young voters particularly disillusioned with the political process—a trend that contributed to the 2022 protests. A recent poll found that only 30 percent of Iranians intend to vote, according to the semiofficial Iranian Students’ News Agency. Many are also voting with their feet and migrating to other countries.

Shadi said that she worried about her daughter growing up in an “environment that denies her her most basic rights,” adding, “I want to move as soon as possible to a country where basic freedoms are more readily available.”

Such freedoms are increasingly under threat for Iran’s female citizens, according to women’s rights advocates and United Nations experts, who say the hijab crackdown is creating a chilling effect on women’s rights activism and legitimizing broader gender discrimination.

According to several women interviewed by the Fuller Project, this means that Iranian women now cannot drive, do their jobs, or even have a coffee without worrying about having their cars impounded, being fired, or getting hit with fines if the hijab is not worn—or worn too loosely. “This crackdown on women’s dress code will further degrade women’s rights to work, study, drive, and participate fully in public life,” said Rothna Begum, a senior women’s rights researcher at Human Rights Watch.

The hijab bill was passed in September and is still awaiting its expected approval by the Guardian Council—Iran’s hard-line watchdog body—before it can become law. It would increase fines, introduce jail sentences of up to 10 years for women who defy dress rules, and widen gender segregation in places ranging from universities and hospitals to parks. U.N. experts have said it could amount to “gender apartheid.”

“The Iranian authorities have been doubling down their oppressive methods of policing and are punishing women and girls to quell widespread defiance of degrading and discriminatory compulsory veiling laws since the popular ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ uprising,” said Mansoureh Mills, an Iran researcher for Amnesty International.

Amini’s death, which occured under police custody after she was arrested for allegedly wearing her hijab too loosely, triggered some of the worst political unrest seen in Iran in decades. While the protests have ebbed, women continue to defy the dress code by posting photos online of themselves unveiled or going out in public without the headscarf.

Anahid, a 21-year-old performing arts student, said she was pulled over in December by police in Tehran while driving and told that her car was being impounded because she had violated the dress regulations. Anahid—whose name has been changed for her protection—said she spent five days dealing with various government offices over the issue and had to pay fines totaling more than $110 to reclaim her vehicle.

“Driving in the streets of the capital has become perilous … but I will not allow such intimidation to alter my driving or clothing,” Anahid said, recounting how some of her female friends had experienced similar incidents.

Whether women do not wear the hijab properly while behind the wheel, at the workplace or simply sitting at a cafe, penalties for noncompliance can be severe. Women convicted of violating veiling laws have been subjected to “degrading punishments,” including being forced to wash dead bodies for Islamic burials and clean government buildings, according to a report published in August 2023 by Javaid Rehman, the U.N. special rapporteur on human rights in Iran.

But it’s not just women who are falling foul of the dress code and being penalized. Ali, a 40-year-old man who owns a cafe on Tehran’s Keshavarz Boulevard, said his business had been shut down twice by authorities because his female customers were not wearing the hijab properly. Authorities have temporarily closed thousands of businesses, from shops to offices, since Amini’s death—because either female employees or customers were seen without the hijab, according to various media reports.

Under the Hijab and Chastity Bill, businesses that flout the law could be fined up to three months of their income. But Ali—who asked that his real name be withheld for security concerns—said he supported the protest movement and that he would not ask women visiting his cafe to cover their hair. “I won’t do it, no matter the losses,” said Ali, who said he expected more raids on his business and further closures over dress code violations. “It’s a normal price to be paid for change to happen in the country.”

Hard-line clerics, top judges, and President Ebrahim Raisi have repeatedly issued warnings in recent months to women who violate the dress code, according to Iran International, a London-based television station that is critical of the Iranian government. At a public event in August, Raisi said, “I am telling you that the removal of the hijab will definitely come to an end.”

Iran is regularly ranked as one of the worst countries to be a woman in terms of gender parity for economic opportunities, education, health concerns, and political leadership, according to research by the World Bank and the World Economic Forum (WEF). Although more women graduate from university than men, Iran has one of the lowest rates of female employment and biggest gender pay gaps worldwide, the WEF’s latest Gender Gap Report shows.

Masoumeh Bagheri, a member of a state-appointed team to empower women who are heads of households in Tehran province, said there is still an entrenched belief in Iran that women belong in the home, and added that their role in society is widely seen as “secondary, complementary, and sometimes unnecessary.”

Such attitudes have left Samira Akbari, a jobless, 25-year-old computer science graduate in Tehran, pessimistic about her career prospects. Akbari—who also asked that her real name be withheld—said she was delighted when she landed her first permanent job for an online store in July 2023 after years of taking short-term contracts to build up her resume. But she was fired after just three weeks and replaced by a male intern.

Akbari said she did not know if hijab regulations played a part in her dismissal, but that her boss had explained that her male colleagues were uncomfortable with her presence.

“I would’ve understood if I was performing poorly, but instead, it’s my teammates not being comfortable around women that got me sacked,” said Akbari, who has since been unemployed.

GAZA—As bombs rain down on Gaza, Maryam Abu Akar has managed to escape death twice. But her loved ones have not. Maryam’s 17-year-old daughter, Sarah, was killed when a bomb landed on their two-story home on Oct. 17—ripping the teenager’s body in half.

In the wake of Sarah’s death, Maryam relied on her husband, Salama, for support. “He helped me bear the loss of my daughter. He told me that everything would be better and that our daughter went to heaven,” the 40-year-old said in an interview in her husband’s family home in Khan Younis, a city in southern Gaza.

Seven weeks later, Salama was chatting with a neighbor when a bomb landed nearby, killing them both. In an instant, Maryam became a widow—and the sole caregiver for their remaining four children. She is far from alone. Thousands of women in Gaza have been widowed by the war or left in charge of households, and aid experts fear that their worsening plight is being overlooked in the humanitarian response.

“I do not know how I will face his absence and raise the children without him,” Maryam said, tears streaming down her pallid cheeks. “Sometimes, when the children make me angry, I tell them: ‘I will call your father.’ And then I remember that he is not here.”

Maryam’s late daughter and husband are among more than 23,000 Palestinians who have been killed in Israeli attacks on Gaza since early October—with about 70 percent of the victims estimated to be women and children—according to CARE International, a global humanitarian organization.

On Oct. 7, the Palestinian militant group Hamas attacked southern Israel, killing about 1,200 people—mainly civilians—and taking more than 240 hostage, according to Israeli figures. Growing evidence is emerging of widespread sexual violence by the Hamas attackers against Israeli women and girls.

Israel responded to the attack with a massive bombing campaign in Gaza that has resulted in the highest civilian death toll in the long-running conflict since 2005. More than 2,780 women in Gaza have been widowed, data from U.N. Women Arab States shows. With at least 85 percent of Gaza’s 2.3 million residents displaced and food, fuel, medicine, and water scarce, these newly female-headed households are struggling to cope, several humanitarian organizations said.

These women not only have to contend with a deeply rooted patriarchal society and systemic legal inequities, but they are now increasingly vulnerable to gender-based violence, unable to support themselves and their families, and lack access to organizations that can help them—be it with food, safe shelter, or health care, several aid experts said.

“Most of the burden will be on the women,” said Lucy Talgieh, head of the women’s program at the Palestinian Conflict Transformation Center, a civil society organization based in Bethlehem. “They have to be strong—to live, and to help their children, and to start a new life, maybe with an injured husband who has become disabled, or maybe as a widow with four to five children to care for.”

Laws in Gaza place women under the protection and guardianship of men, and fail to protect female citizens against honor killings, marital rape, and domestic violence, the United Nations said in a 2018 report.

A woman can lose her right to spousal maintenance if she chooses to leave her husband’s home, and in 2021, a Hamas-run Islamic court ruled that women need the permission of men to travel in Gaza.

Although female literacy rates are high in Gaza, only 17 percent of women were active in the workforce as of 2021, compared to 69 percent of men, data from the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics shows.

In 2017, Gaza had the world’s highest unemployment rate at 44 percent, according to the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development. Most women in Gaza have never had a formal job, and now, even if they could work, there are virtually no opportunities available because of the war.

At least two-thirds of jobs in Gaza have been lost since the war started—roughly 192,000 jobs—the International Labour Organization said in late December, warning that women working in agriculture could lose out if rising unemployment results in men taking their jobs.

Maryam married at 20 and never finished university. She has been a housewife almost her entire adult life and was financially dependent on her late husband, who earned about $9 a day selling clothes in a market.

“I got used to relying on him to raise my children. He was the only breadwinner for us,” Maryam said. “I am not accustomed to bearing the responsibility alone. I do not know how I will continue the path with my children.”

For Gaza’s widows, grief and the trauma of war are compounded by the challenge of suddenly becoming the sole breadwinner, aid workers said.

CARE International said some mothers are only eating once a day because they are putting their children’s health first amid World Food Programme warnings that cases of dehydration and malnutrition are rising.

“There are heightened feelings of fear, anxiety, grief, and anger, and in an emergency, this is associated with the breakdown of social structures, family separation, and the disruption of support networks,” said Nour Beydoun, the regional advisor on protection and gender in emergencies for CARE.

As many women’s organizations in Gaza struggle to remain operational, CARE is working with community leaders and influencers to organize support networks and provide psychosocial support.

Such activities are a reminder of normal life and crucial in helping to “preserve and protect the human soul,” said Sanam Anderlini, the founder and CEO of the International Civil Society Action Network, a women, peace, and security organization.

“I think Palestinians have learned and instinctively understood that to preserve normalcy is itself a form of resistance,” she added.

For serious mental health issues, CARE is attempting to tap into the existing health care infrastructure to get people referred to psychiatrists and provided with medication.

However, Gaza’s only psychiatric hospital stopped functioning in November after it was damaged in an attack. As of mid-December, less than a third of Gaza’s 36 hospitals were still operating, and only partially, according to the World Health Organization.

Research by a range of organizations from the World Bank to the U.N. Human Rights Office has found that gender-based violence, including sexual exploitation and trafficking, increases during war and in post-conflict situations due to economic hardship, displacement, and the breakdown of social structures.

“The first thing that happens is that levels of poverty force women into risky work, like sex work, and forces children into work early,” Anderlini said. “We also see a huge spike in early marriage of girls.”

About 1.4 million Palestinians in Gaza are currently residing in U.N. shelters, and aid agencies have warned that overcrowding in such spaces increases the risk of abuse against women and girls.

Helping widows and female heads of household to find work and make money to support their families is a key way to prevent women and children from being forced to turn to high-risk work as their only option, according to Anderlini and Talgieh.

For example, the Palestinian Conflict Transformation Center is planning to help women join the workforce and develop their own money-making enterprises, as well as provide seed funding for small businesses.

“They will be working, even on a small-scale level at home selling things, but they will find their way with the help of the community, the [nongovernmental organizations],” Talgieh said. “These women have to find ways to survive, and they will.”

One such woman, Widad Abu Jama, a mother of six, recently lost her husband. The 45-year-old said Israeli soldiers shot and killed him when he went to his farm to check on his livestock and look for food for his family.

“I feel like I lost my life, not just my husband,” Jama said, sitting in the crowded classroom of a school that is now being used as a U.N. shelter. Her children were huddled around her, crying from the hunger and the cold.

“I got married at the age of 15. I lived with my husband for a very long time, and I grew up in his house. We worked together on our agricultural land. We spent long hours taking care of the crop. We built our lives together,” Jama explained.

“Now I will go to the land without him. I will be alone among the crops.”

In our turbulent and divided world, there is one unifying constant: Women and girls bear the brunt of conflict. Across most of the globe, they are excluded from war and peace–level decisions. And yet, they suffer disproportionately when things fall apart. They are at home with small children and elderly relatives when bombs start to fall. Their bodies are instrumentalized as weapons of terror. They scramble for food, water, and fuel when male relatives are called up for fighting. And they pick up the pieces when their communities become collateral damage.

It is in part because of these experiences that women are often among those most committed to dialogue and bringing an end to violence. This year showcased women’s vulnerabilities—and their unique peacemaking powers. Here are five ways women made a difference in 2023.

1. Women on the Front Lines in Ukraine

The women of Ukraine have remained steadfast since Russia invaded their country nearly two years ago. More than 60,000 women serve in the military, while millions more ensure social cohesion and spearhead the humanitarian response on the home front.

Two days after Russia invaded Ukraine, the Ukrainian Women’s Fund pivoted from an organization dedicated to preventing gender discrimination and promoting equal opportunities for women into a wartime relief agency. The fund issued rapid response grants and mobilized its vast network of Ukrainian women’s organizations to provide emergency assistance to families fleeing the war. Between March and November of 2022, the fund’s grants to coalitions, partnerships, and civil society organizations totaled almost $750,000, according to its website. These female-led organizations arranged transit to evacuate families from areas of hostility, created shelters for displaced people, distributed humanitarian aid, and organized medical and psychological support for people traumatized by the horrors of war.

The Ukrainian Women’s Fund is currently engaging women’s rights organizations in discussions and planning for Ukraine’s recovery strategy. “Women who are protecting the country from inside, they know how to be crisis managers now,” Natalia Karbowska, the fund’s director of strategic development, said in an interview with the Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace, and Security. That skill will be needed for the country when it starts its recovery, she said.

The Ukrainian National Action Plan to implement the U.N. Security Council’s “Women, Peace and Security” resolution, first adopted in 2016  and updated in 2022 to focus on amplifying women’s leadership in post-conflict recovery and transitional justice initiatives, received a boost from the Biden administration in October with $2 million in supplemental funding.

2. Sudanese Women Fighting for Survival

Despite being sidelined by the gender constraints of Islamic law, in which women are legally required to obey their husbands, women have actively helped keep other women alive amid the conflict in Sudan.

After fighting broke out in April between forces loyal to two rival generals, women were targeted for sexual assault and rape. Their homes were occupied. They struggled to find places to safely give birth as the country’s health care system collapsed. And they—and their children—surged to the nation’s borders, eager to seek refuge in neighboring countries.

Even before the most recent civil strife, Sudanese women had been embattled. Women’s groups had consistently been excluded from power—despite the fact that they played a key role in the grassroots movement that toppled the country’s former military dictator, Omar al-Bashir, in 2019. Back then, female protestors reported that they were beaten; had their heads shaved; and were forced to undress, photographed, and blackmailed. But although the groups of protestors hoped to have a say in reconstructing Sudanese civil society, al-Bashir’s oppressive regime gave way to renewed gender oppression by military commanders.

This year, more than 49 female-led organizations and initiatives formed the Peace for Sudan Platform to support humanitarian aid as well as female-led collective advocacy for an end to the conflict. Women became key providers of support services and emergency relief, operating in the shadows and expanding the margin of possibility through the smart use of technology. Women’s groups in this network organized on the ground through WhatsApp. They launched campaigns to provide health care to displaced pregnant women and distributed hygiene kits.

From abroad, female Sudanese doctors used WhatsApp to provide telehealth services in online clinics. Other women helped high-profile Sudanese activists escape their home country, setting them up with papers and support overseas. “Sudan’s women’s movement has morphed from fighting for rights to fighting for lives,” Neha Wadeker wrote in Foreign Policy.

3. A Pen and a Prize for Peace

On Oct. 6, in the midst of a massive crackdown on female activists by Tehran’s rulers, Iranian human rights activist Narges Mohammadi was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Recognizing her “fight against the oppression of women in Iran and her fight to promote human rights and freedom for all,” the Nobel committee lauded Mohammadi’s more than 30 years of activism, despite “tremendous personal costs,” which have included 13 arrests, five convictions, and a total of 31 years of prison sentences and 154 lashes. At the time of the Nobel announcement, Mohammadi was serving a 10-year sentence in Tehran’s Evin prison, where she continued to document and share stories of state-sponsored sexual assault and battery of female activists and prisoners. In August and October the criminal court found Mohammadi guilty in new trials, adding over two years to her sentence. She reported that new charges were once again brought against her in November.

Outside the walls of her captivity, Mohammadi’s work has been resonant. A brutal campaign of official repression put an end to the massive street protests that erupted in 2022 after a 22-year-old Kurdish-Iranian woman, Mahsa Amini, died in the custody of the country’s morality police. Yet resistance continues online and through acts of civil disobedience, with some women still refusing to wear a headscarf. The regime has responded to perceived threats with added police patrols, hardened warnings, a stricter headscarf law, and mass arrests.

On the day Mohammadi’s family received the Nobel Prize on her behalf, Mohammadi began a hunger strike in prison in solidarity with Iran’s Baha’i religious minority. In her Nobel Prize lecture, delivered by her children, Ali and Kiana Rahmani in Oslo on Dec. 10, Mohammadi wrote she was just one among “the millions of proud and resilient Iranian women who have risen up against oppression, repression, discrimination, and tyranny.”

4. Dialogue for an End to Bloodshed

One day after Mohammadi was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, terrorists affiliated with Hamas, the Palestinian militant group that rules the Gaza Strip, carried out a surprise attack within Israel, killing approximately 1,200 people and taking about 240 hostages. Vivian Silver, the 74-year-old co-founder of Women Wage Peace, Israel’s largest grassroots peace movement that was founded in the embers of the 2014 Gaza war, was originally believed to be among the hostages. On Nov. 13, her family learned that she was among the dead.

Silver, a Canadian Israeli feminist, had dedicated decades of her life to Israel-Palestine peace. She opposed the Israeli blockade of Gaza, in place since 2007, and regularly traveled to the border to pick up sick Palestinians and drive them to Israeli hospitals for treatment. She brought Israeli and Palestinian artisans together to collaborate.

Just three days before the Oct. 7 attack, Silver gathered in Jerusalem with hundreds of other activists from Women Wage Peace and its Palestinian partner group, Women of the Sun. They marched to a rally at the Tolerance Museum, then traveled to the shore of the Dead Sea, where they pulled up seats to a symbolic negotiating table. Together, they called for a peaceful, political agreement to the region’s longstanding conflict—a “Mothers’ Call” for an end to “the vicious cycle of bloodshed.”

“We are not pro-Israel or pro-Palestine,” Yael Braudo-Bahat, the co-director of Women Wage Peace, said to Foreign Policy. “We are pro-peace.”

Women of the Sun, founded by Reem Hajajreh, sent aid to women in Gaza until the banks closed. Even while its own movement in the West Bank is increasingly restricted due to rising settler violence, the group works for an inclusive and sustainable peace.

Marwa Hammad, Women of the Sun’s fundraising coordinator and one of the cofounders, works actively with Women Wage Peace to train women to run in local elections, and she plans to restart her group’s trauma healing program after the war. Before Oct. 7, she held Zoom workshops with women from the West Bank and Gaza. The war interrupted those conversations, but not the organization’s dedication to building peace.

“I think that the presence of the woman should be [in negotiations],” Hammad told Foreign Policy. “I think no woman would choose the war. It would be the last that they would choose.”

Women of the Sun and Women Waging Peace were recently nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.

5. Awakening Humanity Amid Rampant Brutality

For nearly two decades, the eastern provinces of the  Democratic Republic of Congo have been awash in violence as more than 130 non-state armed militias clash with the Congolese army in a fight over land and critical resources including cobalt and gold. The war has displaced 6.9 million people and increasing lawlessness has left women and girls vulnerable to sexual violence, leading to what the U.N.’s refugee agency called a shocking “epidemic” of gender-based violence.

Yet women have emerged as the country’s most promising agents of peace.  Activists such as Liberata Buratwa, who runs a network of female peace monitors, have demanded accountability and security from the Congolese army even as women are excluded from political life and official peacebuilding efforts.

“We want peace, and we’ll keep fighting for it,” said Buratwa in a recent interview. “We are continuing to contact the authorities so that peace can return and we can go home.”

Others, such as Pétronille Vaweka, senior mediator for Engaged Women for Peace in Africa (FEPA), have ventured into rebel-held areas to plead with leaders for dialogue. “I know what [the rebels] do, but we have no other choice than to approach them,” Vaweka told U.N. Peacekeeping this month. “I try to awaken humanity in every person.” FEPA has trained a network of 100 women in negotiation, mediation, and conflict resolution.

These grassroots movements are driving real change. Women represented 40 percent of civil society and community representatives and 30 percent of facilitation teams at a round of  regional peace talks last year.

As 2024 dawns, Mohammadi’s words continue to ring true: “Women will not give up. We are fueled by a will to survive, whether we are inside prison or outside.”

After her husband moved to Saudi Arabia for work, 27-year-old Fadya Salman started sending nude pictures of herself from their home in the Yemeni capital Sana’a. It wasn’t the same as being together, but it helped keep their bond alive.

Then her phone got stolen. The thief threatened to publish the photos online unless Salman——whose name has been changed here to protect the safety of this story’s sources—went out with him. She had become a victim of what authorities in many countries call “sextortion”—the act of threatening to share nude or explicit images unless demands for money or sexual acts are met.

Salman refused. Eventually, her family learned what had happened, and in 2022, she was murdered. A childhood friend who asked not to be named said her younger brother had killed her under pressure from their father in a so-called honor killing. A criminal investigation officer in Yemen confirmed that she had been killed, though no charges have been brought, as is often the case with such killings.

“It was a nightmare,” the friend said while describing Salman’s ordeal. “When a woman is put in a situation like that, she’s on her own. She can’t trust anyone to help her. She can’t go to a male relative because they’ll assume she’s to blame, and another woman won’t be able to help.” 

The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation and its international law enforcement agency warned this year that sextortion is becoming a global crisis. Deep-rooted patriarchal traditions have made women in the Middle East and North Africa particularly vulnerable to this blackmail, activists say. While the bulk of cases are never reported to authorities, a 2019 survey by Transparency International found that one in five people polled in Jordan, Lebanon, and Palestine had experienced sextortion or knew someone who had—among the worst rates in the world. 

Widespread societal attitudes that place the burden of preserving familial honor on women often prevent victims from seeking justice. Instead, as in Salman’s case, the blackmail can have tragic consequences. 

Such strict societal codes are particularly pronounced in Yemen, which ranked last in the World Economic Forum’s Gender Gap Index for 15 consecutive years (from 2006 to 2020) and has a troubled history of so-called honor killings. 

Amaal Aldobai, a Yemeni women’s rights activist and head of the Centre for Combating Violence Against Women, said that women are easy prey for perpetrators of sextortion.

“If a woman falls victim to sextortion, she cannot tell her family because they will sentence her to death instead of getting justice,” Aldobai said.

While some women are lured into sending private images by promises of marriage, Yemeni activist Mokhtar Abdel Moez said that the majority fall victim to gangs that hack into women’s phones and coerce them into prostitution or paying a large sum of money.

“This results in hundreds of cases of divorce, murder, and suicide every year,” he said. “What is incredible is that, in some incidents, women gave in to coercion and were forced into prostitution to avoid the publishing of images that are not even scandalous yet are enough to lead to their murder merely for being in a strange man’s possession.”

Abdel Moez is the founder of Sanad, a nonprofit organization in Yemen that supports cybercrime victims through a network of around 400 volunteer digital experts. When he began the group in March 2020, he didn’t expect to find so many cases of sextortion.

Sanad has received about 17,000 reports of cybercrimes since its launch, 6,000 of which were reported in 2023. Abdel Moez estimates that about one in four are cases of sextortion.

Official figures are far lower. An official at the Ministry of Interior in the Houthi-led government in Sana’a, who asked not to be named as he is not authorized to speak to the media, said that 114 electronic crimes—including sextortion—were reported in 2022. 

Yemen’s Saudi-backed administration in Aden keeps no tally of reported sextortion cases, but multiple officials said they had received dozens of such reports, mostly targeting women. 

Fearing their families’ wrath and distrusting the two rival administrations fighting over power, vulnerable victims instead seek out activists such as Moez and his team. When they receive a report of a crime, the team at Sanad works to identify and contact the extortionist to try to persuade them to hand over and delete the blackmail content. 

Egyptian activist Mohamed El-Yamani started a network called Qawem (or “Resist” in English) in 2020, after a young woman took her own life out of fear that her ex-boyfriend would expose private images of her.

Egypt ranked 134th out of 146 countries in the 2023 Gender Gap Index, and El-Yamani says his group has received reports of more than 100,000 cases of sextortion since it started. But he believes that this is only a small fraction of the crimes committed. 

El-Yamani said that Qawem has successfully intervened in 4,000 cases, using a network of volunteers to dissuade each perpetrator by tracing his location and threatening to expose his actions to his family, friends, and colleagues. Realizing that the victim has support is often enough to deter blackmailers, but if it doesn’t, Qawem encourages victims to report the perpetrators to the authorities. 

In one case, El-Yamani said, images of a girl from a prominent family in Egypt were published online, showing her without a headscarf. The girl had refused to accede to the demands of her blackmailer, who wanted money and video calls with her. When the content was published, she was accused of recklessness and made to stay home from school.

El-Yamani said Qawem managed to defuse the situation by tracking down the blackmailer and getting him to apologize and remove the content from the internet, while also convincing the girl’s father to allow his daughter to return to school.

Egypt, El-Yamani added, is a regional leader in tackling the problem. Authorities have created digital investigation units throughout the country to handle such crimes, and they have passed laws to ensure that the identities of victims who come forward remain hidden. Qawem-style interventions would be much harder in countries such as Yemen and Syria, he said.

“Many women in these countries would rather deal with their sextortionists secretly, regardless of the consequences, as their families would hold them responsible for not protecting their family’s honor,” El-Yamani said. 

Experts say that the patriarchal nature of family relations in some Middle Eastern countries has contributed to the problem.

“One common factor in all 3,657 cases that approached us is the victims’ blind trust in the perpetrator, due to them lacking the feeling of being loved and embraced in their own surroundings,” said Zainab al-Aasi, a Syrian psychiatrist and the founder of a nonprofit called Gardenia that offers legal and mental support to female victims of sextortion.

In Yemen, there are no laws addressing sextortion, said Fawzia el-Meressi, a board member at the Yemeni Women’s Union, a nonprofit. Even if there were, she argued, such crimes against women would not stop; they are the result of a patriarchal system that “creates a huge void between her and her male family members, which is exploited by criminals.” 

Omaima, 21, whose name has also been changed for her safety, connected online with a man introduced to her by a friend as a researcher for a women’s health organization. The man offered payment for information about her life—a persuasive offer in Yemen, one of the poorest countries in the world, where 80 percent of the population depends on humanitarian aid. 

At first, Omaima responded to the questions he sent via WhatsApp, sharing details about her relationship with her husband and pictures of her without a headscarf—a major taboo in the strict Muslim society that she is part of.

Then the questions began to take on a sexual nature, making her feel uncomfortable, she said. But after she began to ignore him, the man threatened to send the photos to her husband, carrying out the threat when she refused to engage. 

Her husband divorced her. “He didn’t even hear me out,” Omaima said.

This piece is published in collaboration with Egab, a group that works with journalists across the Middle East and Africa

KERICHO, Kenya, and SAVAR, Bangladesh—Rose Nyunja was just 18 when she began working in the tea plantations of Kericho, Kenya’s biggest tea-growing region and a major source of employment for poor women in the country. For decades, she toiled away in the tea gardens, picking the leaves by hand. 

Then came the harvesting machinery. Women like Nyunja started to lose their jobs by the thousands to machines that could each replace more than 100 workers.

One evening in 2020, Nyunja returned to the staff quarters to find her front door barricaded. She’d been fired. Nyunja pleaded with her supervisor to save her job — and her home. Instead, company security ejected her from the compound.

“My 26 years of service meant nothing to them,” she says, fighting back tears. “I was given one hour to remove my household items and leave. I have never experienced such humiliation and embarrassment in my life. I worked diligently for over two decades and what have I got? Nothing.”

As Kenya’s tea estates automate to improve productivity, workers like Nyunja represent a broader global trend: women are more likely than men to lose their jobs. A 2019 study from Britain found that 70 percent of jobs at high risk from automation are held by women. And this April, a University of North Carolina study found that almost 80 percent of the female workforce in the US will be affected by advances in generative artificial intelligence, compared to 58% of men.

While recent advances in generative AI have sharpened concerns about loss of jobs for white-collar workers, job losses due to companies ramping up automation have been taking place for years, as seen in Kenya. Kweilin Ellingrud, a director at McKinsey Global Institute, says her research shows that automation is fourteen times more likely to impact low-wage workers than high earners.

“I think the reason it’s grabbing headlines is because it is also affecting higher wage jobs for the first time,” says Ellingrud. “I think now generative AI is focusing and impacting jobs across the spectrum — it affects your job, it affects my job. Some of us, myself included, aren’t used to thinking: ‘How will my work have to change? How will my job change?’”

In Kericho, Roselyne Wasike, a tea picker, says her income has fallen by almost half, from $150 a month to $80 a month, as the machines take over larger shares of work on the plantation. Even those who have managed to keep their jobs cannot escape the impact of automation. Many of them are widows and single mothers. 

“These machines have disadvantaged women by making them redundant instead of giving them other tasks within the tea estates,” Wasike says.

The Kenya Plantation and Agricultural Workers Union says that 30,000 women have lost their jobs as a result of automation in the past five years. About 60 percent of the 75,000 workers currently employed in the tea sector are women, down from an estimated 75 percent in 2017, according to Dickson Sang, the secretary-general of the union.

The resentment towards the machines boiled over into violence this May. Kericho residents torched nine harvesting machines worth $1.2 million in a plantation owned by Ekaterra, the producer of Lipton and TAZO teas. The clash resulted in two deaths and the arrest of Kericho’s governor. Ekaterra suspended operations for two weeks, leaving more than 16,000 employees without work.

One of the areas of dispute had been a provision in the industry’s collective bargaining agreement that workers, most of whom are women, would be kept on as machine operators. Labor leaders say multinationals have “flatly refused” to implement this.

“I do not condone the destruction of property. But these workers are now fighting back because the tea firms keep moving the goalposts,” says Sang.

Ellingrud says 85 percent of jobs impacted by generative AI will be concentrated in four job categories: food services, customer service and sales, office administration, and manufacturing. The first three are dominated by women. Even in manufacturing, women workers like Nyunja are vulnerable compared to men, who have a higher chance of being re-trained for roles involving automation. 

The COVID-19 pandemic showed that women are more likely to lose jobs during periods of economic upheaval, and are slower to return to the workforce, Ellingrud says: “Women’s unemployment is more sticky.”

Her research at McKinsey has found that 12 million people will need to switch jobs by 2030, and that women are 1.5 times more likely than men to have to change their occupation. She says this means governments and businesses need to urgently take targeted actions to re-skill and up-skill women.

Automation has also radically changed the make-up of Bangladesh’s garment industry, once hailed for transforming women’s employment prospects. Women once made up over 80 percent of the garment workforce today they account for less than 60 percent. In 2019 the government projected that half a million garment workers, mostly women, would lose their jobs to automation.

At Moni Garment and Training Center in Savar, a garment hub north of the capital Dhaka, Mizanur Rahman drills his trainees on how to operate machines used for weaving and knitting. A former garment worker himself, he says being sensitive to small areas of concern goes a long way towards making women feel more comfortable. 

This includes hiring female instructors for female trainees and offering flexible hours so that women can show up before or after taking care of household chores. He says the confidence women gain from their training can lead to increased recognition at work.

“Many of my trainees perform well and are promoted to supervisor or line chief positions,” Rahman says.

Supervisory roles and roles operating automated technology are likely to be among the key jobs that survive in a post-automation landscape. Both tend to be dominated by men. In Bangladesh’s garment industry, women have long made up less than 5 percent of supervisors despite being a significant majority of the workforce.

There have been some signs of success. The Gender Equality and Returns project, run by the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation and the International Labor Organization, says 60 percent of its trainees have been promoted to supervisory positions, and the number of female supervisors in the industry has jumped to 12 percent since the program began in 2016.

Abdullah Hil Rakib, a director at the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association, the country’s largest trade association for the industry, says the key obstacle to women thriving in supervisory or machine operator roles is psychological.

“It’s a barrier in our mindset,” he says. He points out that automation means less physically strenuous work for both men and women, eliminating one barrier that would have previously made some jobs less accessible for women.

“Even when a man runs a heavy automatic cutter machine, he only pushes a switch on and off. He does not need to do more,” Rakib says.

Ellingrud says about 10 percent of jobs created every year tend to be new roles that didn’t exist before, but women take up these jobs at a lower rate than men. People won’t be losing their jobs to AI, she says, but to people who know how to use AI; women who are unable to adapt risk being left out of the new economy.

Adaptation feels like a distant prospect in Kericho, where Nyunja hawks vegetables on the street to make ends meet.

“I used to be able to take care of my family and pay my children’s school fees,” Nyunja says. “Now my future looks bleak. I can barely pay my rent, let alone send my child to school.”

Maher Sattar contributed reporting from New York.

KOLHAPUR, MAHARASHTRA: 44-year-old Neeta Kashid has no time to rest. The community health worker’s day is packed with visits to women and children in her village in southwest Maharashtra, assisting them with health emergencies, providing maternal and neonatal support, conducting surveys and immunization campaigns, and acting as the face of the Indian government’s health and sanitation drives in the area. On top of all this, she has to tend to a small farm. Despite being a full-time frontline health worker, she makes less than minimum wage, and relies on extra income from selling produce to make ends meet.

“My salary is not enough to survive,” said Kashid, “I have two school-going children. I need to pay their fees and raise them.”

Kashid is one of roughly a million Accredited Social Health Activists (ASHA), part of an Indian government program that serves as a critical link between rural and poor communities and the public healthcare system. They were catapulted into the spotlight for their role in ensuring access to primary care for the rural poor as COVID-19 devastated India in 2021, winning a Global Health Leader Award from the World Health Organization.

But the award has also spurred increased scrutiny of their working conditions, not just for ASHA workers, but for community health workers (CHWs) all over the world. CHW programs have been lauded as a cost-effective way to reduce maternal and infant mortality, HIV, tuberculosis, and many other diseases over the past decades. But the reason they’re cost-effective is because this overwhelmingly female workforce is poorly paid, like Kashid, or not paid at all — in many countries they are an all-volunteer corps. 

A 2022 report by Women in Global Health, a global nonprofit, estimates there are 6 million female health workers who are unpaid or underpaid, and say they believe this is a conservative figure due to a shortage of available data. Their research built on a 2015 paper in Lancet which claimed that unpaid work by CHWs potentially contributed $1.4 trillion to the global economy — implying that the unpaid labor of mostly women health workers was subsidizing almost 2.5% of global GDP at the time.

“Why is it that we don’t put a price tag on this particular labor force and build that into the cost of these programs?” says Roopa Dhatt, a physician who is the executive director of Women in Global Health. “It is exploitation, and it should be called out.”

ASHA workers across India have gone on strike this year, and continue to strike in some states, demanding better pay and formal employment status, which would come with health and pension benefits. They are part of a growing wave of organizing around the world by health workers and experts calling on the governments, donors, and nonprofits who have reaped the benefits of CHW labor to match their rhetoric of praise with a living wage.

“[CHWs] are an anonymous donor, a nameless benefactor to everyone else,” says Madeleine Ballard, the executive director of the Community Health Impact Coalition, which advocates for the professionalization of CHWs around the world. “In the vast majority of communities around the world, CHWs are the working poor. In the context of poverty and limited access to decent work opportunities for women, this is not a free choice to volunteer, but it’s actually wage slavery. I don’t volunteer for my community 37 hours a week, you know?”

“The irony is a lot of these programs are funded by international organizations that have a real rhetoric around women’s empowerment,” Ballard adds. “And that’s used to provide moral cover for what are, in effect, programs in which female labor is cheap.”

A job so great it can’t be paid

CHW programs have evolved through what Ballard calls a couple of “hype cycles”. The Chinese government pioneered village health workers starting in the 1930s. These “barefoot doctors” became famous worldwide in the ’50s and ’60s, and by the ’70s had inspired programs globally as the international community rallied around the goal of providing primary healthcare for all by the end of the 20th century.

The economic crises of the ’80s marked a setback for the growth of these programs, but interest in them was revived in the new millennium as the HIV pandemic focused attention on providing services to rural communities across the African continent. CHWs came to be seen as an effective way to reach marginalized and vulnerable populations in tackling the biggest problems in global public health at the time, such as malaria and tuberculosis. Today, CHWs are going through another hype cycle as yet another pandemic rips through the  globe.

“The amount of money that goes into hospital care is so extraordinary, and the evidence that investing in hospitals themselves will improve the health of a population — it just doesn’t exist,” says Henry Perry, a doctor who’s a leading researcher on CHWs at Johns Hopkins University. “CAT scanners, open heart surgery, kidney transplants, all of this stuff is valuable, but it’s very expensive when you compare the return on investment to teaching community health workers how to diagnose and treat childhood pneumonia or detect hypertension.”

The ASHA program has its roots in a 2002 program that started in Chhattisgarh, one of the poorest states in India, and was adopted nationwide in 2005. In India’s case, the focus was on child mortality.

“ASHA became a necessity for services being provided by the government,” says Sujatha Rao, a former Health Secretary at the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare who was involved in launching the project. “The key target was of course reducing maternal and infant mortality levels that were unacceptably high and had to be brought down.”

When the program was introduced, the responsibilities of ASHA workers were limited to creating awareness, providing counsel, mobilizing the community, and providing some primary medical care. Over the years, these responsibilities have increased, and so have their hours — going from working a handful of hours a week to a full-time workload.

“In 2009, when I joined as an ASHA worker, we had 5-10 indicators that we had to focus on,” said Netradipa Patil, a union leader representing more than 3,000 ASHA workers in Kolhapur, Maharashtra. “Now, we have to focus on 74 indicators.”

Then came COVID-19. As praise poured in from all directions for their frontline work, ASHA workers themselves were floundering with little support. Kashid was physically assaulted by a villager for trying to enforce the government’s quarantine rules. Another ASHA worker, 43-year-old Usha Jadhav, had a heart attack which doctors told her was due to irregular meal timings and high levels of stress from her work.

For many experts, the struggles of CHWs during COVID-19 laid bare the lie behind a common trope used to justify their lack of pay: that women are innately motivated to serve their neighbors and community, and that to pay them would sully the spiritual benefits of their work.

Instead, researchers like Kenneth Maes at Oregon State University are finding that far from being in a satisfied state of fulfillment, CHWs in Ethiopia experience more psychological distress throughout the year compared to others in their areas, partly due to the strain of their work and partly due to their poor economic status.

“It’s emotional blackmail,” says Margaret Odera, a Nairobi-based CHW who is working to create a national association of CHWs in Kenya. “I have had people come visit us from the USA who say ‘you community health workers are doing a great job.’ And if we say ‘so you will pay us?’ [They say] ‘We can’t, because your job is so great that you can’t be paid.”

For Odera, the matter is straightforward. Doctors derive satisfaction from their work too, but they’re still paid; CHWs are health professionals providing vital services, and should be paid accordingly. 

She details the health statistics she’s gathered for her latest report to her supervisors: children who have been dewormed; children born inside the hospital and outside; children who are malnourished; mothers who are pregnant; community members with non-communicable diseases. The list goes on.

She recalls: “One time my son was asking me: ‘Mom, you go to the hospital every day. I think you’re a doctor. But at the end of the month, when I ask you to buy me something, you say you don’t have any money. What’s happening?’ And you know, I have nothing to say.”

On April 15, Fahima Hashim awoke to the sound of her nephew shouting her name. “The war has started!” he yelled. Her family hunkered down in their Khartoum home, hoping the conflict between two warring factions of Sudan’s military would be short-lived, and they’d be able to wait it out.

“I didn’t sleep at night,” Hashim recalled. “I’d sleep when everyone woke up, because I wanted to protect them from anything [that might happen] in their sleep.” 

After 14 days, supplies started to run low, and Hashim decided they needed to flee. It wasn’t the first time. 

In 2014, Sudan’s military dictator Omar al-Bashir accused Hashim of destroying the fabric of Sudanese society because of her work as the founder of Salmmah Women’s Resource Center, a group that documented violence against women and fought for reforms to Sudan’s legal system. She escaped to Canada and built a new life for herself and her daughter. When al-Bashir fell from power five years later, she thought it would finally be safe to return.

Women like Hashim were at the forefront of a grassroots movement to topple al-Bashir—one of the revolution’s most iconic images was of a young woman named Alaa Salah standing atop a car in front of army headquarters with her finger raised in fierce protest. These women had hoped al-Bashir’s downfall would earn them equal rights and freedoms alongside men at last. Instead, the transitional government—led by fundamentalist military commanders who had served under al-Bashir—sidelined women, continued to emphasize the primacy of Islamic law, and supported a coup in 2021. 

Far from securing equality and a seat at the negotiating table, Sudanese women continued to be targeted with sexual violence, systemic exclusion from the political sphere, and imposition of strict dress codes. 

“After the revolution, whenever women talked about representation or participation or [the need] to include women’s rights … [male politicians] just said ‘this is actually not the right time’ and ‘these women are so annoying,’” said 31-year-old activist Lina Marwan, who was arrested in January 2019 alongside 86 other young women during intense protests against the al-Bashir administration.

Despite the backslide, women such as Marwan and Hashim refuse to give up. They continue to coalesce in online spaces, leading emergency relief efforts, organizing health care, and helping women and children to flee the country. They’re still fighting for what they’ve demanded for nearly a century: a meaningful seat at the peace talks and a significant role in the governance of a new Sudan.

Sudan has a rich history of strong women’s rights movements that stretches back to the 19th century. The formation of the Sudanese Women’s Union in the 1950s marked a critical moment as women took up the cause of independence from British colonial rule. In 2018-19, their momentous protests against al-Bashir in front of the Army Central Command led to them being called Kandakat after powerful historical queens.

“You could hear in the cell [that] the girls are talking and chatting,” said Marwan about her time in prison during that period. “The girls are beautiful and very strong and have a very revolutionary spirit, and they made a lot of joy inside this dark, lifeless place.”

But Sudanese leaders have always attacked values they deemed antithetical to Islam and Sudanese culture. Sudan’s first dictator, Ibrahim Abboud, banned the Sudanese Women’s Union in 1958. In the 1980s, Jaafar Muhammad Nimeiry’s military dictatorship imposed Islamic law on the country, removing a ban on female genital mutilation in the process. Al-Bashir came to power in 1989 on the back of a military-led Islamization project that institutionalized discriminatory anti-women policies, such as stoning and flogging for women who wore pants or refused to cover their hair.

“The women’s movement has always been a target for dictators. And that shows you how strong the women’s movement was,” said Quscondy Abdulshafi, an advisor at Freedom House, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank.

When al-Bashir fell, Sudanese women saw a wide range of possibilities open up in front of them. Sudan’s new Constitutional Declaration contained strong language about the role of women and a 40 percent quota requirement for women’s participation in parliament. Religion was separated  from the state, and al-Bashir’s public order act was repealed—reflecting the hopeful nature of that moment for women.

But the promise was short-lived. The military-led transitional government soon revealed that it had not strayed far from the conservative Islamic ideology of al-Bashir’s regime. On reviewing civil society proposals for a new democratic government, the 10-member military council expressed a key reservation: “The declaration failed to mention the sources of legislation, and the Islamic Sharia law and tradition should be the source of legislation,” Lt. Gen. Shamseddine Kabbashi, a spokesman for the military council, told reporters at a press conference.

Following the 2021 coup, the military leaders dissolved the ruling body instituted by the Constitution Declaration and declared a state of emergency. Then, they turned on themselves. In April, civil war broke up between two rival generals. The transitional government had included the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a paramilitary unit that faces several accusations of mass rape; this group is now at the forefront of the civil war. 

Today, women are experiencing widespread gender-based violence, sexual assault, and rape; pregnant women are struggling to give birth as the health care system crumbles; and women and children make up the majority of the refugee population fleeing across Sudan’s borders.

Since the outbreak of civil war, Sudan’s women’s movement has morphed from fighting for rights to fighting for lives. Women have become key providers of support services and emergency relief. 

“Women from civil society all around Sudan, they have a WhatsApp group called Women for Peace,” Marwan said. The group is providing health care for displaced pregnant women and distributing hygiene kits for women and girls. 

They’re providing some services for men, but the focus is on women. “Because throughout environmental disasters or anything that’s broken out in Sudan, men started to see women’s needs as secondary,” Marwan explained.

Other groups include Sudanese women doctors based abroad who participate in WhatsApp clinics, providing telemedicine services. Some, such as Sara Abdelgalil, a National Health Service physician in the United Kingdom, are also coordinating with organizations on the ground to provide online training for Sudanese medical students who still have access to the internet.

Meanwhile, from Canada, Hashim is helping high-profile activists escape the country. She’s organizing paperwork and visas with the support of women’s rights organizations, raising money for the harrowing bus journey from Sudan into Egypt, and securing funds to support women with rent and food for at least three months as they settle into their new lives. 

Hashim is also engaged with a WhatsApp group called Women Against the War, which supports Sudanese resistance committees. 

Foreign-policy experts such as Sanam Naraghi Anderlini, the executive director of the International Civil Society Action Network, a women, peace, and security organization, say research shows that the presence of women can make a massive difference in peacebuilding. Including women as negotiators, mediators, and signatories increases the likelihood of an agreement lasting at least two years by 20 percent, and the likelihood of it lasting at least 15 years by 35 percent.

“[Women] are bringing a very stark human lens into these political power discussions,” Anderlini said. “The women are going to be asking, ‘does your cease-fire include stopping rape? Does it include getting the RSF soldiers out of people’s homes? Stopping the looting? What are the elements of the cease-fire?”

Hashim wants to take it a step further: She believes that a new Sudan will rise only if women take control of the country. She says the women’s movement has already developed its own policies on climate change, health, and reproductive rights. They were working out their preferred educational policies when the war broke out.

“Enough is enough,” Hashim said. “I think men have destroyed Sudan. What has the army done? The war in South Sudan. The war in Darfur. It’s been 67 years since independence, and those men haven’t done anything [for] Sudan. They made it worse.”

“I think we should make a shadow government with all our ministers,” she said. “It can only be done by women, by feminists.” 

The 33-year-old woman had attempted suicide twice: the years-long investigations and trials had been that stressful. Even then, she said she had only reported a fraction of the sexual abuse she’d suffered, fearing she might be punished for false accusations if her allegations were dismissed under South Korea’s strict rape law.

“This is the painful reality faced by victims on the ground. Yet these politicians only keep talking about so-called false sex crime accusers as a winning strategy for elections,” said the woman, who requested not to be named for fear of public shaming.

The politicians she refers to are now in charge. President Yoon Suk-yeol came to power in May last year on a platform that included anti-feminist ideas, accusing them of causing the country’s low birth rate and denying structural sexism existed in the country, despite social and economic indicators that strongly suggest otherwise. One of his chief campaign promises was that he would go after people who lie about being raped.

Since Yoon took office, the number of people investigated in cases of “false accusations” has surged. While most of these cases don’t involve sexual assault, South Korean women’s rights activists say politicians and much of the media have focused on false allegations of rape, fomenting a hostile environment that silences genuine rape survivors.

Not long ago, a feminist wave was sweeping across the economically advanced but culturally conservative country, launching Asia’s most powerful #MeToo movement and taking down powerful abusers, including a presidential contender. But these women are now facing a major political backlash. A men’s rights movement that rejects the notion of male privilege has rallied around the belief that false accusations of rape and sexual assault are widespread, and it helped fuel Yoon’s rise to the presidency. Though official statistics on the number of sexual assault cases reported in 2022 have not yet been released, The Fuller Project and Foreign Policy spoke to several women’s rights advocates who say they’ve already noticed a “chilling effect” on rape survivors thinking about filing a case.

“When victims call us for help these days, one of the most common questions they ask is, ‘Would I be charged with false accusation if I report my case?’” said Yun Gyeong-jin, an official at the nonprofit Korea Sexual Violence Relief Center (KSVRC). “Now, many victims seem to think not once, but twice, three times before making a decision on whether to report or not. It’s a worrying situation.”

Earlier this year, South Korean prosecutors announced that the number of indictments in “false accusations” was 68.8 percent higher in the second half of 2022 compared to the previous six months, before Yoon began his term. A flurry of sensational headlines greeted the announcement. “Those who falsely claim ‘I’ve been raped’ will become convicts if caught by this prosecutor,” one proclaimed.

Prosecutors say the increase is the result of a course correction after the previous center-left administration restricted their powers. But feminists say the focus on rape is telling.

“Although the prosecutors’ latest crackdown targeted … false accusations of all kinds, only false sexual assault complaints were promoted and recognized as the most typical case of false accusation. It’s because we live in a world where catching false complaints of sexual assault is considered a key accomplishment,” said a joint statement by about 50 women’s rights groups.

Coercion vs. consent

At the heart of the controversy is a 1953 law that defines rape on the basis of physical violence, not lack of consent. The switch from coercion-based to consent-based rape law has been adopted in recent decades by several countries, mostly in Europe, reflecting United Nations guidelines that favor the latter. Feminists in South Korea have been trying to reform the law for years, but their efforts have created a sense of panic among some men who believe it would result in a flood of false allegations of rape.

“This is a law aimed at killing men,” wrote one commentator on FMKorea, a prominent right-wing website popular among young men. 

South Korea has become a global economic powerhouse, but it continues to suffer some of the widest gender inequities among wealthy countries. It has the largest gender pay gap—by a significant margin—among OECD countries, and women only account for 15 percent of managerial positions in government and the private sector. The country is considered exceptionally safe, except that nearly 90 percent of violent crimes are committed against women.

The global #MeToo movement inspired many South Korean feminists to hit the streets and voice their grievances like never before, and they successfully campaigned to legalize abortion and pushed through landmark legal changes on the widespread problem of tech-based sexual abuse, most notably spycam porn crimes. But this has also motivated a men’s rights counter-movement to fight back with vigor. When Yoon, a former chief prosecutor and presidential candidate, began to roll out campaign promises that echoed their rallying cries, they lined up behind him.

During his campaign, Yoon promised to dismantle the country’s gender equality ministry, which is highly controversial with the men’s rights movement. When the ministry, after years of deliberation and pressure from feminist groups, suggested updating the rape law to base it on consent, the proposal drew such swift, angry condemnations from the ruling party’s lawmakers that they withdrew the idea in just nine hours. Now, the Yoon administration is considering removing reformation of the law from its gender equality ministry’s five-year plan to ensure it won’t be officially discussed during his term in office, which ends in 2027.

“The changes in the political and social climates are clearly having a chilling effect,” one prominent advocate for sexual assault victims told The Fuller Project and Foreign Policy. The advocate goes by the nicknames “Witch” or “D” in order to protect herself from the harassment that frequently targets women who speak out about rape in South Korea. 

Witch knows this harassment from personal experience. A survivor herself, she had to fight off a barrage of criminal accusations brought up by her rapist after she reported him. They included defamation, false accusation, insult, coercion, and even sexual harassment. After her assailant was eventually convicted and jailed, she adopted the insult her attacker’s friends had once hurled at her as a gesture of defiance against the witch hunt that she experienced for reporting the crime.

Since then, Witch has set out to help other victims who endure similar “revenge accusations.” She educates experts from prosecutors to court judges about legal hurdles that push many victims into silence and monitors sexual abuse trials on behalf of victims. 

Other women have turned up in courtrooms to join her in a show of solidarity since the #MeToo campaign kicked off in 2018. These women now fear their hard work will be undone by the growing political clamor to punish “false accusations”—a call that defies statistical realities. Witch said some survivors who had recently sought her help had given up on the idea of reporting the crime.

Approximately 0.78 percent of sexual assault cases in South Korea are pursued by prosecutors for false claims, according to state data. The country already has one of the world’s toughest laws against false accusers, punishable with up to 10 years in prison—compared to up to five years in countries such as the United States and Germany. 

Meanwhile, defamation is considered a criminal offense in South Korea, and speaking the truth can still be a crime. Article 310 of the Criminal Act states that a claim is not defamatory only if it is both true and solely for the public interest, and has come under widespread criticism from the United Nations and Korean activists.

The result, women’s groups say, is an environment where only 1.4 percent of those who experienced sexual violence in South Korea seek help from the authorities, according to a government survey. Those whose rape complaints are dismissed by the authorities can be potentially pursued for false accusation—a risk that now looms larger in the eyes of many victims.

The Fuller Project and Foreign Policy reached out to a spokesperson at the South Korean president’s office by text but did not receive a response.

The Ministry of Gender Equality and Family said in a written statement it is taking a “victim-centered” and “strong punishment” approach to follow the president’s orders to protect victims of gender-based violence and plans to roll out an anti-stalking law this summer.

But these claims have gained little traction with the country’s feminists, who are struggling to figure out how to move forward.

“It feels like the clock of our society is sliding backward,” Witch said. “But women can’t go back to the past now,” she added, echoing several victims and advocates.

“We certainly feel bitter about the reality, but we also see this as an opportunity,” said Kim Dong-eun, another activist at KSVRC. Her group plans to capitalize on the public attention on the consent-based rape law and combat pervasive online misinformation about it, such as allegations from men’s rights activists that it would require people to sign a written consent form to have sex.

She draws some hope from the fact that Yoon’s pledge to dismantle the gender equality ministry has failed to materialize due to opposition from the rival center-left party, which took a strong stand on the issue after months of protest and pressure from women’s rights groups. 

“The odds seem to be stacked against us, but we’ll try our best to ride this out,” Kim said.

The survivor who had attempted suicide finally did manage to see her abuser convicted in court with the help of Witch. 

“I’m not a very educated person, but I know this much,” the 33-year-old woman said. “My life, my truth, and my right to be protected from violence are precious, and they are not some kind of a chip in someone’s political game.”

PORT LOKO, Sierra Leone—Standing in the scorching afternoon heat, Aminata Bilkisu Kanu takes off her sunglasses to wipe away the beads of sweat trickling down her face as she appeals to the crowd of mostly male voters.

“Think ‘women’ when voting in the June 24 elections,” she tells them. “We keep your resources within; the men take them away.”

The 24-year-old single mother is the first woman to run for the national parliament from Mamoi village, part of the Masimera Chiefdom in Port Loko District, located in the conservative north of the country. Patriarchal culture runs deep in Sierra Leone, but it is even stronger in the north and parts of the east, where customs do not allow for women to become a paramount chief, the traditional name for the district leader. 

But this election is the first since the country passed a landmark gender quota law earlier this year. The law clearly states that the workforce in any public or private institution must be at least 30 percent female, and Bilkisu is hoping this will help her shake things up.

“It is very tough for us!” she told The Fuller Project and Foreign Policy.

Ever since they were introduced in modern form in Argentina in 1991, gender quotas for national elections have been criticized by opponents on the grounds that they are non-meritocratic, undemocratic, and nepotistic. But that hasn’t stopped their adoption by the majority of countries in the world, and on June 24, Sierra Leone will become the latest to hold elections with a gender quota in place.

Today, there’s a growing consensus among academics that these quotas “work.” Studies from across the world have shown that, aside from putting more women in positions of power, quotas also typically lead to legislatures with higher qualifications and greater diversity in terms of class, age, and experience, and can shift budget priorities from defense spending to education and health care.

“It depends on what ‘works’ means,” said Alice Kang, a University of Nebraska-Lincoln professor who coauthored a cross-national analysis on the effectiveness of gender quotas. “Does having a quota save a country from descending into authoritarianism? No, it doesn’t.

“[But] we found that quotas are perhaps the most impactful thing in terms of explaining why some countries have much higher levels of women’s representation than others. Back in the day, people thought religion, how wealthy a country was, or electoral systems made the difference. Compared to other factors, we found that [gender] quotas were having a significant and large effect.”

Scholars warn that the effectiveness of gender quotas varies widely from country to country, and their success is heavily influenced by factors such as the existence of strong enforcement mechanisms and the political will to implement them.

“The devil is totally in the details,” said Jennifer Piscopo, coeditor of The Impact of Gender Quotas, a book that dives into case studies from Europe, Latin America, Africa, and Asia.

“Most Latin American countries have a proportional representation system, which means that when voters go to the polls, they’re voting for a party list,” she said. “A lot of the first quota laws said parties [had] to nominate 30 percent women. OK, great; so where do parties put their 30 percent women? They put the women at the bottom 30 percent of the list. If you’re at the bottom of the list, you’re probably not going to get a seat, because the further down the list you are, the less likely it is that the party won enough seats to get to you.”

Bilkisu is at the bottom of her party’s list. She’s candidate number nine out of 10 in her district for the All People’s Congress, Sierra Leone’s largest opposition party. Sierra Leone also has a proportional representation system; for Bilkisu to go to Parliament, her party must win 88 percent of the vote in Port Loko District to gain nine seats, far more than projected.

But Bilkisu remains sanguine. 

“The men are warming up to us,” she said. “The turnout is great in my door-to-door campaign. I see a lot of cooperation from them. So there is a chance for me.”

From exception to entitlement

Even in countries where quota laws are considered weak, researchers are finding that they still play a role in empowering women. 

In Nepal, researcher Punam Yadav found that political quotas “not only accelerate women’s representation in politics, but also strengthen their position in society. [Quotas] establish women’s credibility, pave the way for future generations and shift the social perception of women’s presence in politics from being an exception to being an entitlement.” 

Women who are elected in countries with gender quotas are often criticized as being less qualified than the men they replaced, or for being proxies of powerful men. But recent scholarship has begun to debunk these views. 

A 2017 study from Sweden partially titled “The Crisis of the Mediocre Man” found that “far from being at odds with meritocracy, this quota raised the competence of male politicians.” The study said this was the result of the departure of mediocre male leaders who faced a more competitive landscape due to the increased participation of women.

On the nepotism charge, Piscopo says the perception had a lot to do with cherry picking examples.

“OK, maybe there’s a woman who’s the wife of the party boss,” she said. “Well, how many brothers, or sons, of party bosses end up running for office? 

“At certain points, you run out of wives and daughters. There’s not an infinite supply, and you start tapping into networks that you ordinarily wouldn’t be tapping into.”

Parties reluctant to embrace quotas often claim they’re having trouble finding qualified women, Piscopo said, but she attributed this to a lack of political will to find them. She cited the example of Mexico, where women’s groups put out a full-page ad with the names of 1,000 women who were qualified to run for office after some political leaders said they couldn’t find any.

“Remember when Mitt Romney said he had ‘binders full of women’?” Piscopo said, recalling a famous campaign gaffe by the 2012 U.S. presidential candidate. “I love that quote. We all made fun of Mitt Romney, but actually, if we step back from the inartful phrasing, what he’s saying is civil society organizations made lists of qualified women for his cabinet and turned them over to him.”

Mexico is an example of how creative approaches can strengthen gender quota laws that are initially weak. Early efforts fell far short of reaching the gender quota, partly due to parties placing female candidates in races that were lost causes. In response, the country’s electoral agency categorized each seat as an easy win, an easy loss, or a competitive race for each political party based on previous results and demanded that female candidates be fielded in equal numbers in each of the three categories. The result is that Mexico now has gender parity in parliament.

Piscopo, Kang, and several other academics said it was especially critical that strong penalties exist for parties that fail to meet quota requirements, such as removing them from the ballot. When countries lack this political will, the number of women in office can remain stubbornly low. 

In Brazil, which implemented a 30 percent quota in 1997 but has only 17.7 percent women in its national parliament today, parties have been accused of promoting “ghost candidates”—submitting women as candidates to meet the quota without actually campaigning for them—sometimes without the women even knowing they’re on the ballot.

In Sierra Leone, a recent report by the Institute of Governance Reform, a civil society group based in Freetown, the capital, states the country is unlikely to hit its goal of electing 30 percent women, with parties accused of placing female candidates too low on their candidate lists to win. 

Meanwhile, the next Parliament of 149 members will include 14 paramount chiefs representing the country’s 14 geographical districts. Elections for the chiefs have already been conducted, and only one woman was elected. In nine of the districts, mostly in the north, women are still barred from becoming paramount chief. 

Nemata Majeks-Walker, the founder and head of 50/50, a women’s rights group that advocates for gender parity in Sierra Leone, said the passage of the quota was “mere lip service.” 

“I don’t feel there is the political will anywhere,” she said. “I think it is just a show, a mere show. It’s as if the men in Parliament were scared of the women taking their places.”

Bilkisu holds out hope that her party will make the changes needed to give women like her a fighting chance. 

“I want to encourage my party to amend its constitution in the future so that it will not only give us 30 percent on paper, but [also] ensure safe seats for women by enshrining the positioning of women at the top of the list,” she said. “If not, the 30 percent quota won’t work.”