Gender Equality
MAINSTREAMING GENDER EQUALITY, YOUTH & SOCIAL INCLUSION.
MAINSTREAMING GENDER EQUALITY, YOUTH & SOCIAL INCLUSION.
As Africa enters the 2026 AU Year of Water and Sanitation, African Renaissance Trust stands alongside GIMAC as a strategic civil society partner, recognized in official AU stakeholder mappings alongside the Gates Foundation, AfDB, AMCOW, and major development partners.
ART’s collaboration with GIMAC positions the women’s movement at the center of the 2026 agenda, ensuring that water security is framed not merely as infrastructure, but as gender equity, climate justice, and socioeconomic transformation. From the Lusaka Water Partnership Conference to the UN Water Conference in December 2026, ART provides the technical architecture linking WASH with health, climate resilience, and the priorities of Canada, Denmark, Sweden, Netherlands, and Finland.
This is multilateral harmonization in action: aligning AU frameworks, REC implementation, Member State domestication, and development partner financing around a unified vision.
Water as a pillar. Gender as the foundation. African Renaissance as the bridge.
When Africa needed practical tools to close the gender and youth gap in sanitation and strengthen the implementation of the ASPG (insert link), African Renaissance Trust answered with an instrument that was ideated and born from African evidence and African expertise.
In partnership with APHRC (the continent’s leading population health research institution) and AMCOW (Africa’s Ministerial Council for Water) and , we co-created the GEYSI Toolkit for the Water and Sanitation Sector, a modular instrument that has been adopted by ministerial convenings accross Africa and one that translates inclusion principles into enforceable standards across the entire policy cycle.
African Renaissance is supporting institutions to diagnose African challenges in sanitation. African researchers are helping us generate African evidence and African policymakers are owning and implementing African solutions.
The toolkit covers pre-policy diagnostics, design standards, implementation guidance, and accountability scorecards, ensuring that gender, youth, and social inclusion become the organizing logic of sector reform.
From aspiration to architecture. From commitment to capability. This is the African Renaissance at work.
Trustees Commitment to Partnering with the African Union Women Gender & Youth Directorate | Addis Ababa, Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia| February 2025
African Renaissance Trust was at the table, not as observer, but as supportive technical partner.
Through sustained collaboration with the AUC Directorate and the Global Center for Gender Equality, we contributed to the ideation and development of the AU Gender and Youth Mainstreaming Framework. The framework is organized around three dimensions: People, Programs, and Policies.
The April 2025 Nairobi write-shop marked a pivotal milestone, operationalizing the framework with guidelines, scorecards, and implementation pathways.
This partnership demonstrates our capacity to work at the highest levels of continental governance, shaping enabling frameworks that will be referenced by AU institutions for decades.
When the AU needed partners who understood both technical rigor and political navigation, African Renaissance delivered.
When the Gender Is My Agenda Campaign convened its 6th Strategic Engagement with the African Union in Accra, African Renaissance Trust Trustees and Team in a demonstration of true partnership anchored operation intellectually, technically and financially.
ART provided end-to-end logistical, financial, and technical coordination, professional media coverage through Ghana News Agency, Peace FM, Joy Online, and GTV, multilingual interpretation, and full audiovisual documentation.
Beyond logistics, ART commissioned and supervised the consultancy to track AU uptake of GIMAC recommendations, ensuring civil society voices didn’t vanish into summit communiqués but were systematically monitored for implementation.
This is Renaissance infrastructure: African institutions convening African women’s movements, resourced by African organizations, holding African governments accountable. Commitment demonstrated. Credible orchestration delivered.
When the African Union embarked on developing its first legally binding continental instrumentto end violence against women and girls, African Renaissance Trust was not on the sidelines—it was co-leading the civil society engagement.
In collaboration with GIMAC Network and Nala Feminist Collective, ART co-organized the September 2024 CSO Regional Consultations that gathered perspectives from 546 civil society organizations across all five African regions—North, South, East, West, and Central Africa. ART developed and launched the GIMAC-African Renaissance Harvesting Toolkit, which captured 814 citizen voices to ensure the Convention reflects the lived realities of African women and girls.
ART’s Trustee Caroline Kwamboka delivered opening remarks alongside the GIMAC Chairperson and UN Women Representative, while ART staff moderated sessions and led continent-wide sensitization campaigns.
From research to consultation to advocacy—African Renaissance shaped Africa’s most significant gender law in a generation.
Co-organizer. Co-designer. Co-owner of continental transformation.
When the GIMAC Network convened Regional Economic Communities and partners in Malabo, African Renaissance Trust delivered more than attendance—it delivered intellectual firepower on the frontlines of Africa’s justice agenda.
ART led the Workshop on Economic and Climate Justice during Youth Advocacy Training, shaping a powerful continental dialogue on dismantling colonial economic legacies and building just, green futures. The session equipped young advocates with actionable strategies on climate reparations, debt cancellation, and sustainable development—arming the next generation to lead with purpose and vision.
This was not passive participation. ART’s contributions were formally captured in the Outcome Document now informing REC-led initiatives, AU Member State engagement, and advocacy campaigns for transformative reparations across the continent.
From workshop facilitation to policy influence to youth empowerment—African Renaissance demonstrated that continental transformation requires African voices shaping African futures.
Ideas that matter. Impact that endures.
