Africa Has a Femicide Crisis, But What’s New?

There is a serious femicide crisis in Cameroon. Between August 6 and August 26, 2026, 14 women were reportedly killed, eight of which were killed in a single week — several by current or former partners, and some in front of their own children. The Ministry for the Promotion of Women and the Family, known locally as MINPROFF, has acknowledged a surge in reported femicides since 2023, with at least 250 women killed in three years, 50 of whom were killed between January and April of this year. MINPROFF has warned that its own figures represent only the “tip of the iceberg.” This is a warning that echoes across much of the continent. In November 2024, a United Nations report on femicides found that Africa recorded the highest rate of intimate partner and family-related killings of women in  any region of  the world, a finding that has since been borne out in the steady, almost routine drumbeat of cases coming out of several countries.

Femicide, as defined by the United Nations, is the intentional killing of women and girls with a gender-related motivation. It is considered the most brutal expression of violence against women, the final and irreversible point on a continuum that so often begins quietly, in homes, behind closed doors, long before it ends in a morgue. In Cameroon, that violence is widespread and deeply rooted, sustained by entrenched gender inequality and institutions too weak or too indifferent to intervene. Accountability remains rare, and impunity has become its own kind of policy.

In 2022, the Cameroonian government adopted a national strategy to combat gender-based violence, alongside a national gender policy. In June this year, the minister of MINPROFF, Abena Ondoa neé Obama Marie Thérèse, told parliamentarians that her ministry was finalising a bill to create a standalone criminal offence for gender-based violence and to strengthen legal protections for women. In August, following the week of killings, the president convened a national security meeting at which the rise in femicide cases was discussed. Yet promises and meetings have not yet translated into tangible efforts.

Nearly six thousand kilometres to the south, in Kempton Park, South Africa, a case involving a suspected serial killer has deepened. Between  July 15 and September 15, eight women’s bodies have been recovered in and around the same stretch of the city, most of them half-naked and bearing visible bruising, with discovery sites clustered along the R21 corridor and, most recently, in nearby Olifantsfontein. Among them was Elizabeth “Tsontso” Moselakgomo, a 38-year-old mother and retail manager who disappeared on September 9, 2026  after leaving home for an afternoon run and was later found behind a hotel in Rhodesfield. Her family identified her body at the Germiston mortuary, bringing a painful end to a search that had begun when her eight-year-old daughter raised the alarm after her mother failed to return home. National police spokesperson Brigadier Athlenda Mathe has repeatedly stressed that a serial killer has not been officially confirmed, even as she has described the similarities between the cases as “sufficiently concerning” to justify a public warning.

In the meantime, the advice handed down to women living in and around Rhodesfield has been to avoid walking or running alone, to stay out of secluded spaces, and to move in groups wherever possible. It is advice that women have heard for generations, and it is advice that some believe places the burden of survival on the wrong shoulders. For now, the women of Kempton Park wait, caught between official uncertainty and the plain fact that eight of their neighbours have been brutally murdered.

In Girei, a rural community in Adamawa State in Nigeria’s North East, two women were killed within a single week in August. Aisha, a young mother, was found with her throat slit in a hotel room after what appeared to have been a violent encounter with a man she had been seen with only minutes earlier. A week later, Hyellachardati Benham, known to her family as Susuti, went missing while collecting firewood alone in the nearby hills, a task she usually shared with her sister-in-law. She was found two days later, her body showing signs that she had been raped and killed, left in the forest long enough for her injuries to have begun to change before anyone reached her. Her brother, Yakubu Da’aya, described a woman who was determined in everything she did, someone who would not rest until a task was finished, and a household that has been left struggling to make sense of her absence.

Document Our History, a Nigerian femicide observatory, has recorded more than 40 women and girls killed in suspected gender-related attacks between January and May 2026 alone, and has said that a woman or girl is killed in Nigeria roughly every 49 hours. Ololade Ajayi, the organisation’s founder, has described the killings as crimes committed with impunity and has called for traditional and cultural leaders to abandon harmful practices against women, warning that the figures continue to climb by the day. UN Women, for its part, has estimated that more than a hundred women and girls are killed globally each day by intimate partners or family members, with Africa recording the highest rates of any region in the world.

Nigeria’s main legal tool against this violence is the Violence Against Persons (Prohibition) Act, signed into law in 2015. The VAPP Act criminalises a broad range of abuses, including rape, spousal battery, forced isolation, emotional and economic abuse, harmful widowhood practices, and female genital mutilation, and it provides for protection orders and compensation for survivors. But the law only applies automatically in the Federal Capital Territory; individual states must domesticate it before it takes effect locally, a patchwork that rights groups say has slowed enforcement and left many survivors without recourse. As of 2026, the only Kano state has yet to  adopt the VAPP act.

In September 2024, the act itself came under threat: a bill sponsored by Kogi East’s Senator Jibrin Isah to repeal and replace the VAPP Act passed a second reading in the Senate, drawing sustained pushback from civil society groups, legal advocates, and international organisations including the Malala Fund, who warned that scrapping the law without a stronger replacement already in place would strip protections from women and girls just as femicide rates were climbing.

A country reveals what it thinks a woman is worth by what it is willing to spend, build and enforce before she is killed, not after. Right now, across much of Africa, that answer lies in the gap between the laws and measures that exist and the ones enforced.