By Professor Narnia Bohler-Muller

When the 70th session of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW70) opened at United Nations headquarters in New York on 9 March the world witnessed something unprecedented in seven decades of multilateral gender diplomacy. The Agreed Conclusions, which have traditionally been adopted by consensus, were instead passed by recorded vote: 37 in favour, 1 against (the United States), with 6 abstentions. The applause that erupted in the General Assembly Hall was a political declaration.

For those of us working on gender equality from the Global South, that moment crystallised something long understood: the terrain on which women’s rights are contested is shifting, and Africa cannot afford to be a passive observer.

The backlash is organised, not incidental

The CEDAW Committee Chair warned plainly: “We are witnessing a well-orchestrated backlash against gender equality across regions — the erosion of sexual and reproductive health rights, shrinking civic space, attacks on women human rights defenders, and rising levels of gender-based violence, both offline and online.” Calling the backlash “well-orchestrated” is not alarmism. It is diagnosis.

Washington proposed at least 70 amendments during negotiations, calling for entire paragraphs to be deleted, objecting to language on diversity, equity and inclusion, climate change, the definition of gender, and reproductive health rights. One proposed amendment would have introduced a formal definition of gender limited to biological sex only. These were not procedural quibbles. They were an attempt to rewrite the conceptual foundations of international gender law.

Yet this story is not only about Washington. Africa must contend honestly with its own position in this landscape. The African Union – the largest regional bloc in the UN, comprising 54 countries – also sought to remove references to sexual and reproductive health and reproductive rights from the Agreed Conclusions. The fractures within what we might hope to be a unified progressive Global South bloc are real, and naming them is the beginning of honest politics.

Africa’s moment to lead — not follow

The more important story is one of African feminist agency. The Africa Disrupt CSW70 convening, held in Accra in February 2026, marked the fifth gathering of a growing continental feminist strategy space. Under the theme “Centering Justice, Ensuring Equality for African Women and Girls,” the convening was both a reflection and a reckoning.

As Dorcas Coker Appiah, a founding member of WILDAF Ghana, noted: “Access to justice is not just about laws — it is about whether women can use them.” Across Africa, the statistics are not abstractions. In Kenya, over 100 women were reported killed within just a few months, with thousands more cases of gender-based violence documented. Progressive constitutions and ratified conventions exist in abundance on this continent. What remains elusive is implementation.

South Africa knows this tension acutely. Our Constitution remains among the most gender-progressive in the world, enshrining equality, dignity, and the right to access courts. Yet our femicide rates place us among the most dangerous countries in the world for women. The gap between constitutional promise and lived reality is a justice architecture problem, of underfunded legal aid, inaccessible courts, patriarchal institutional cultures, and structural inequalities that CSW70’s priority theme squarely confronts.

The G20 thread: continuity from Johannesburg to New York

South Africa’s 2025 G20 Presidency, and the Women20 (W20) process it hosted, positioned our country as a serious contributor to the global gender equality architecture. The Johannesburg Goals advanced care economy frameworks, raised modern slavery on the W20 agenda for the first time, and championed women’s economic inclusion across the Global South. A dedicated CSW70 side event examined key lessons from South Africa’s G20 Presidency for reaffirming and strengthening multilateral structures as platforms for achieving gender equality.

This continuity matters. The gender equality agenda does not reset every year with a new host country. It accumulates or it erodes. If the Johannesburg commitments are not carried forward into multilateral frameworks like CSW70, they become political theatre rather than policy architecture. Africa’s task now is to ensure that the gains secured under our G20 Presidency survive the turbulent multilateral weather of 2026.

The Ubuntu imperative

There is a philosophical dimension to this that African scholarship must not leave unsaid. Ubuntu – umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu, a person is a person through other persons – is not merely a cultural greeting. It is a relational ontology that insists on the irreducible dignity of every person, and on the community’s obligation to secure the conditions for that dignity to flourish.

Justice, in an ubuntu frame, is not merely procedural. It is restorative, communal, and forward-looking. It asks not only “was the law followed?” but “was dignity restored?” and “can this community thrive together?” This is precisely the reconceptualisation of justice that CSW70 calls for and one that African feminist scholars and advocates have been developing long before New York took notice.

South Africa’s transformative constitutionalism offers a concrete bridge between this philosophy and legal practice. When our Constitutional Court has interpreted socioeconomic rights expansively, centring dignity as the lodestar of equality jurisprudence, it has been doing ubuntu work in legal form. The challenge ahead is to bring that framework into international law in ways that resist both Northern imposition and African conservatism.

A call for principled positioning

Outright International captured the moment precisely: “While a vote for the first time is a concerning development that deepens the fracture of the multilateral system, it also represents a sign of political will of governments to push against the gender backlash and uphold their commitments to the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action.”

The Agreed Conclusions adopted at CSW70 affirm that access to justice is a transformative force that advances equality and non-discrimination, protects against violence and abuse, and strengthens trust in institutions. Africa helped negotiate that text. Africa must now help implement it in our courts, our communities, our constitutions, and our continental institutions.

Professor Narnia Bohler-Muller is a Professor and Divisional Executive at the Human Sciences Research Council, an Advocate of the High Court of South Africa, and former Co-Chair of the Women20 (W20) during South Africa’s 2025 G20 Presidency.