Tomorrow (9 September), the African Union (AU) Peace and Security Council (PSC) will convene the Ministerial High-Level Seminar on Women, Peace and Security (WPS), also known as the Swakopmund process, in Cotonou, Benin.

Corinne Amori Brunet, Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Benin and PSC Chairperson for September, is expected to deliver opening remarks, followed by Liberata Mulamula, Special Envoy of the Chairperson of the AU Commission on WPS, and Mrs Doris Mpoumou, Special Representative of UN Women to the AU and United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA). Speciosa Naigaga Wandira Kazibwe, former Vice President of the Republic of Uganda, is also expected to make a statement.

The Council’s inaugural meeting, held in Swakopmund on 23 March 2024, institutionalised the Seminar as a biennial, rotational platform for PSC engagement with WPS actors and formally named it the ‘Swakopmund Process’. Its fourteen action points sought to translate long-standing commitments into operational requirements, including gender parity in AU-led and co-led mediation; a Policy Framework on Women Quotas in Formal Peace Processes with a statutory minimum of 30 per cent participation; annual reporting to the PSC; rapid-response and monitoring arrangements; costed NAPs; and WPS financing. The second edition is expected to focus on participation, prevention and protection under the theme ‘Operationalizing the Women, Peace and Security Agenda: Quotas, Accountability, and the African Union Convention on Ending Violence Against Women and Girls (AU-CEVAWG)’. It is therefore the first substantive opportunity to test whether Swakopmund is evolving into an accountability process rather than another recurring political forum.

It is anticipated that tomorrow’s session will follow up on the implementation status of the outcomes of the inaugural high-level seminar. In this respect, the AU PAPS 2024 Annual Digest records that the Gender, Peace and Security Programme and Mediation and Dialogue Division ‘followed up with consultations to develop the draft outline’ of the quota policy framework. The PAPS WPS overview similarly confirms that ‘the AU Commission is in the process of developing the policy’ on gender parity in AU-led and co-led mediation.

As with other AU normative and policy commitments, one of the major challenges to the WPS agenda is the policy-to-implementation gap. In the case of the WPS, this gap is further accentuated by entrenched institutional and societal attitudes and practices as well as the recent global backsliding in gender equality. As documented extensively in Amani Africa’s work, the AU’s WPS agenda has made notable institutional achievements with the establishment of various mechanisms and processes, including the Office of the AU Special Envoy on WPS, FemWise-Africa, and the Continental Results Framework (CRF). Yet the core deficit is increasingly one of implementation and translation of these institutional advancements into operational outcomes, such as in the representation and participation of women across all peace processes. The Research Report reviewing the 15-year implementation of the AU PSC’s WPS agenda pointed out that ‘significant gaps persist between commitments and practice’. The Windhoek+25 Declaration renewed attention to delivery during the 25^th anniversary of UNSCR 1325, stressing that WPS commitments should ‘translate into tangible results’ and called for women’s leadership across conflict prevention, peacemaking and peacebuilding.

In terms of participation, the implementation gap is most evident in women’s limited access to formal peace processes. UN Women’s 2025 WPS facts and figures show that women represented only 7 per cent of negotiators and 14 per cent of mediators globally in 2024. Globally, of 36 peace agreements reached that year, only 11, or 31 per cent, included at least one provision referring to women, girls, gender or sexual violence, suggesting that assessing participation should extend beyond numerical representation to whether gender-related priorities are reflected in negotiated outcomes. More directly relevant to Africa, at the AU–Member States WPS coordination meeting, the AU acknowledged that women remain ‘dramatically underrepresented in formal peace processes’, comprising less than 20 per cent of negotiators in African mediation efforts despite FemWise-Africa having trained more than 500 women mediators. This is not unique to peacemaking and peace agreements. It also applies to peace operations. The challenge is therefore to translate available expertise into systematic appointment, meaningful participation and influence in Track I and other formal processes.

The participation pillar needs to translate the 2024 quota and parity commitments into enforceable obligations. The 1242^nd meeting of 31 October 2024 affirmed implementation of the Swakopmund conclusions and requested exploration of ‘dedicated funding’ for gender components of peace and security, including from the Peace Fund, while the 1268^th meeting of 21 March 2025 called for ‘clear and realistic roadmaps’, adequate and sustained funding, and ‘clear indicators and robust monitoring and evaluation mechanisms’.

The UN Secretary-General’s Common Pledge for Women’s Full, Equal and Meaningful Participation in Peace Processes adds political momentum, and in October 2025 the AU reaffirmed its support, urging actors to ‘turn its promises into practice’. Cotonou could set deadlines for the quota and parity frameworks, assign institutional responsibility and require sex-disaggregated participation data for every AU-led or co-led peace process.

Participation also needs to connect formal negotiations with local peacebuilding. Related UNDP work (here, here, here and here) illustrates the importance of linking formal participation to community mediation, early warning and response, local peace infrastructures and women-led prevention. This aligns with Cotonou’s expected emphasis on elevating community-level women peacebuilders and strengthening their influence on national, regional and continental processes.

In terms of prevention, the meeting is expected to broaden the discussion from women’s presence at negotiation tables to their role before crises escalate. The July 2025 Cotonou coordination meeting recognised that the ‘evolving nature of conflict presents new dimensions’ to WPS implementation, including weaponisation of social media against women leaders and climate impacts on vulnerable communities. The PSC’s 1334^th meeting in March 2026 further brought artificial intelligence and technology-facilitated violence into the WPS agenda, calling for digital threats to be addressed in a ‘gender-responsive and preventive manner’ and for women-led technological solutions to support early warning, conflict prevention and peacebuilding. Prevention under Swakopmund should therefore encompass women’s participation in early warning, preventive diplomacy and community mediation, alongside responses to structural, digital and gender-based threats.

This prevention agenda is closely linked to protection, where the normative environment has changed most visibly since the inaugural seminar. The adoption of AU-CEVAWG in 2025, together with the May 2026 AU roadmap for its signature, ratification, domestication and implementation, provides a stronger legal framework that can support operationalisation of Swakopmund’s rapid-response and monitoring commitments. The roadmap describes AU-CEVAWG as ‘Africa’s first legally binding instrument dedicated exclusively to eliminating all forms of violence against women and girls’, while the Convention itself requires preventive and protective measures addressing the causes and consequences of such violence, complementing the Maputo Protocol on Women’s Rights. The roadmap further connects the two pillars by emphasising prevention through transformation of harmful social norms and protection through ‘survivor-centered support and multi-sectoral referral systems’.

Financing and localisation are central to prevention. The outcome of the 6^th High-Level Africa Forum on WPS in Tunis recorded 37 African NAPs and six Regional Action Plans by late 2025, while identifying ‘funding unpredictability, austerity pressures, and shrinking resources’ as implementation obstacles. Swakopmund required NAPs to be costed and budgeted, and the February 2026 Assembly decision Assembly/AU/Dec.978(XXXIX) appealed for ‘predictable and sustainable financing’ and encouraged Member States to ‘institutionalise gender-responsive budgeting and allocate dedicated national resources’ for National and Regional Action Plans. A 2024 UN Women evaluation found that, of 30 African countries with UNSCR 1325 NAPs, only 15 had costed budgets for their activities. The AU’s February 2026 high-level discussion on financing gender commitments likewise stressed ‘concrete budgetary allocations, measurable targets, and transparent accountability mechanisms’. Predictable financing is essential because underfunded local implementation weakens early-warning, mediation and resilience capacities.

Accountability cuts across all three pillars. A June 2025 workshop to reinvigorate CRF monitoring identified ‘critical gaps’ and called for simplified reporting, harmonised timelines, consistent feedback and stronger use of CRF findings in policy and budgeting. The 1309^th meeting in October 2025 subsequently requested a mechanism for complementary civil-society shadow reporting under the CRF. Amani Africa’s aforementioned Special Research Report notes that ‘grassroots women’s organisations hold unique insights into WPS implementation’ and that reporting has remained irregular and insufficiently evidence-based. The CRF briefings to the PSC could therefore be used together to track implementation of the gender-parity policy. A Swakopmund scorecard could consolidate these and civil-society inputs, recording commitments across participation, prevention and protection as implemented, delayed or outstanding and giving the biennial process an institutional memory.

The expected outcome of tomorrow’s meeting is a communiqué. The Council may call for measures to address identified implementation gaps, particularly those relating to women’s participation quotas and accountability mechanisms. The PSC may also provide guidance for further development of the Policy Framework on Women’s Quotas in Formal Peace Processes, with a view to ensuring its practical and enforceable application in AU-led and co-led processes. It may also encourage the strengthening of localisation and creating pathways for community-level women peacebuilders to influence national, regional and continental peace processes. On prevention, the PSC may underscore the need for women’s participation in early warning, preventive diplomacy and community mediation alongside responses to structural, digital and gender-based threats. It may also call for strengthened monitoring through the CRF and annual FemWise-Africa reporting. It may echo the AU Assembly in calling on Member States and RECs/RMs to allocate dedicated financing for NAPs and Regional Action Plans. The PSC may further call for concrete measures to integrate the prevention of and protection from violence against women and girls across AU-led and co-led peace and security operations, with AU-CEVAWG serving as an important legal framework complementing the Maputo Protocol. The PSC may welcome the roadmap for the signature, ratification, domestication and implementation of the Convention and may call on Member States to sign, ratify, domesticate and implement the Convention.