This report examines anti-rights mobilisation in Africa, assessing it as a continent-wide political phenomenon, and analysed through a feminist, political-economic lens that situates law, culture, religion, and funding not as isolated factors, but as mutually reinforcing systems of power.
Drawing on participatory qualitative interviews with feminist, young feminist-led, and community-based organisations across East, West, Central, and Southern Africa and supported by survey data and secondary research, the report interrogates why anti-rights forces are gaining institutional traction. It also interrogates how they operate across different legal and linguistic contexts, and what this means for feminist movements operating under increasingly constrained conditions.
The report argues that anti-rights mobilisation in Africa is neither merely a spontaneous cultural reaction nor an isolated national phenomenon. Instead, it operates as a structured political project shaped by colonial legal legacies, sustained through transnational ideological and financial networks, and mobilised by political, religious, and social actors who instrumentalise moral panic to consolidate power, negotiate social change, and respond to economic and political insecurity.