Every 8 March, International Women’s Day reminds us of an essential reality: if this day is still necessary, it is because women’s rights remain fragile. They only become real when they are defended, explained, and made tangible in the spaces where life truly unfolds.

As the 2030 deadline for the Sustainable Development Goals approaches, African feminist movements, youth-led organisations, and other civil society actors are increasingly coming together in a more constrained environment: shrinking civic space, a rise in anti-rights rhetoric, and major pressure on funding for sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR).

In Dolisie, in the Republic of Congo, some memories never fade. Yann Mboungou-Tsoumbou has carried one since childhood: the image of a classmate humiliated because of her period. She had been isolated, mocked, reduced to a shame that even the adults did not know how to name. He was barely twelve, unable to react, unable even to understand why the scene hurt him so deeply. He still remembers her eyes, shattered. And his own, turning away — the eyes of a child without the words or the power to intervene.

They said she looked like “someone living with HIV”. In the lanes around her home in Cameroon, children joked that the rashes on her skin made her look like a frog, that she was turning into a monster. At home, no one explained why she was always ill. For a long time, Honorine did not know what was happening inside her body, or why she had to swallow the bitter pills she sometimes hid away or quietly threw into the bin.

Bogotá, 6 November 2025 — In a global landscape often saturated with promises, the political voice of West and Central Africa resonated clearly at ICFP 2025: it is young, determined, and collective.