We advance women's leadership, youth agency, and social inclusion as non-negotiable foundations of African development. Through our GEYSI approach, we embed equality into the policies, budgets, and institutions that shape daily life.
Across Africa, gender inequity is not an oversight to be corrected at the margins of policy. It is a structural condition reproduced through legislation, budget allocation, and institutional design. From under-resourced sanitation infrastructure that disproportionately burdens women and girls, to legal frameworks that lag the Maputo Protocol's commitments, the gap between continental aspiration and lived reality is not a matter of awareness — it is a matter of power.
African Renaissance Trust treats gender equality as a precondition for development, not an outcome of it. We work in the rooms where policy choices are made — and stay in the rooms long enough to see those choices written into law.
The same engagement architecture we apply across every pillar — tuned to the actors and instruments that shape gender outcomes on the continent.
We engineer coalitions between the African Commission on Human and Peoples' Rights, national governments, and women's rights organisations to align gender commitments from the Maputo Protocol with national policy agendas. Our partnership with the ACHPR on developing the Guidelines on the Right to Sanitation in Africa — focused on women and girls — is supported by Canada, Denmark, Sweden, the Netherlands, and Finland.
We produce the GEYSI Mainstreaming Toolkit (Gender Equality, Youth and Social Inclusion), unveiled at the 39th AU Summit in February 2026, equipping policymakers and practitioners with decision-ready frameworks for embedding equality into WASH policies, budgets, and institutional practice. With the Guttmacher Institute, we lead SRHR policy research at the AU through Project 616.
We drive the domestication of the Maputo Protocol and ACHPR Sanitation Guidelines into binding national legislation and budget allocations — moving gender equality from continental aspiration to enforceable country-level commitment.
A decision-ready framework for embedding gender, youth, and social inclusion into WASH policies and budgets — unveiled at the 39th AU Summit.
A precedent-setting continental guideline focused on women and girls, developed with the ACHPR and supported by the Bilateral Five.
SRHR policy research at the AU level, conducted with Guttmacher Institute — designed to inform continental and national policy reform.
We are scaling four investment areas across the Gender Equality pillar: ACHPR Sanitation Guidelines country pilots, GEYSI Toolkit institutional adoption, SRHR policy research expansion, and Maputo Protocol legal domestication tracking.
