As we observe this day in 2026, the evidence before us is not of progress; it is of a deepening catastrophe, played out in the bodies of women, girls and children across the continent.

In Sudan, the number of women and girls requiring support after experiencing gender-based violence has nearly doubled in two years and quadrupled since the start of the war. “Women and girls are being raped and killed in their homes, and as they flee, seek food, water, and medical care. The use of sexual violence has been embedded in the blueprint of Sudan’s war,” the UN Women Regional Director for East and Southern Africa has stated. Today, more than 17 million women and girls in Sudan require humanitarian assistance.

In the Democratic Republic of Congo, UNFPA recorded over 80,000 cases of rape in eastern Congo between January and September 2025, representing a 32 per cent increase on the previous year. Among displaced women, 97 per cent had either experienced or witnessed sexual and gender-based violence during the conflict.
Somalia, South Sudan, the Central African Republic, Central and North-East Nigeria, Mali, and northern Mozambique present a similar pattern.

Conflict-related sexual violence destroys women’s economic agency. It drives women from their workplaces, their farms, their communities. It silences women trade unionists and women organisers who are themselves targeted. Catastrophic cuts to humanitarian aid funding have forced UNFPA to withdraw from more than half of the health facilities it was supporting in Sudan. At the same time, in the DRC, a near-total shortage of post-exposure prophylaxis kits across eastern Congo left survivors without basic medical care for months.

ITUC-Africa calls on the African Union and its member states to treat conflict-related sexual violence as a peace and security priority, ensuring accountability for perpetrators and reparations for survivors in all peace processes. We call on all parties to armed conflict to immediately embrace dialogue and to cease the use of sexual violence as a tactic of war, in full compliance with international humanitarian law and UN Security Council resolutions.
We call on governments and donors to restore and sustain funding for gender-based violence response. And we call on all affiliated national trade union centres to integrate the protection of women workers in conflict zones into their advocacy initiatives. Silence is not an option.

We salute the women-led organisations working under extreme risk in Darfur, in North and South Kivu, and across every African conflict zone, reaching nearly 20 million people in Sudan alone, providing food, medical care, psychosocial support, and mediating access in places where formal systems have collapsed. We reiterate our call for dialogue to end the conflicts.

Signed by Akhator Joel ODIGIE, General Secretary, ITUC-Africa, Lome, Togo.