From Burkina Faso’s Code of Persons and Family, stipulating equal inheritance for brothers and sisters, to Mali’s state-manded electoral gender quotas, requiring at least 30% of candidates on electoral lists to be women, eye-catching progressive policy is perceived as a beacon of change in regions like West Africa. However, statutory legislation often conflicts with lived experience for women in these areas where women’s rights have been stifled since colonization. Burkina Faso’s Family Code does not apply to women married under customary law and Mali’s electoral quotas coexist with customary laws that limit women’s autonomy, rendering them virtually ineffective in boosting female representation. While it is important to recognize progressive policy successes in West Africa, it is equally critical to avoid muting the voices of those still suffering despite legislation.

Definitions

For the purposes of this article, statutory law is defined as legislation passed by legislative bodies in West Africa, as well as international or continental treaties, conventions, and charters signed or ratified by West African nations. Conversely, customary law consists of traditional or religious rules and practices accepted as law by a specific culture. This article adopts the conceptualization of West Africa as defined by the African Union and African Development Bank; the 15 countries of Benin, Burkina Faso, Cabo Verde, Côte d’Ivoire, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone, and Togo. Women’s rights is a complex and multifaceted term, but this article focuses on the four core dimensions of women’s rights as outlined in the OPEC Social institutions and Gender Index (SIGI), a global measure of sociopolitical discrimination against women. These dimensions include family practices, physical integrity rights, access to financial resources, and civil liberties. 

Statutory Law

Many statutory policies have been created and ratified by West African nations in the past three decades, spanning all four dimensions of the SIGI. Several examples for each dimension are outlined below.

• Family Practices: The African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child, ratified by all 15 West African countries, targets the practice of child marriage. Article 21 of the Charter urges nations to “take effective action, including legislation” to prohibit child marriage and declare 18 as the minimum age for marriage. Additionally, the Protocol to the African Charter on Human and Peoples Rights on the Rights of Women in Africa (PACHPR), signed by all 15 West African countries, addresses familial inheritances. Article 20 of the Protocol stipulates the right to an equitable inheritance, for both widows inheriting part of their former husband’s property and female siblings inheriting part of their parent’s property. Examples of family practice legislation nationally include Gambia’s Children’s Act Amendment Bill of 2016, outlawing child marriage and gives a 20-year prison sentence to offenders, and Senegal’s Family Code stipulating that gender should not play a role in familial inheritances.
• Physical Integrity Rights: The African Youth Charter, signed by all West African Countries and ratified by all but Liberia and Sierra Leone, requires countries to “enact and enforce legislation that protects young girls and young women from all forms of violence, genital mutilation, rape, sexual abuse, sexual exploitation, trafficking, prostitution, and pornography”. Examples of national women’s physical integrity rights policies include Cabo Verde’s 2011 Special Law on Gender-Based Violence and Benin’s 2012 Act on the Prevention and Punishment of Violence Against Women. The former provides greater protection to survivors and increases penalties for perpetrators while the latter stipulates specific provisions for the investigation and punishment of perpetrators.
• Access to Property and Financial Resources: The UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, ratified by two-thirds of all West African countries, details women’s rights to equal pay for equal work, family benefits, and all forms of financial credit. Moreover, the aforementioned PACHPR calls for nations to ensure the maintenance of women’s property rights. National policy on this topic includes Mali’s national labor code, which provides all women with 14 weeks of maternity leave fully paid by the government, and Liberia’s constitution, which states that “every person shall have the right to own property alone as well as in association with others”. 
• Civil Liberties: The UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women stipulates women’s right to vote and hold political office. The PACHPR also requires equal representation of women with men at all levels of electoral processes. National policy on this issue includes Togo’s Law on Electoral Campaign Funding, which necessitates fund allotment to each political party in proportion to the number of women from that party who have been previously elected.

Customary Law and Lived Realities

Statutory policies often conflict with customary law and social practices in West Africa. This leaves room for significant abuses of the four SIGI dimensions of women’s rights. 

• Family Practices: Despite several statutory policies against child marriage, 30% of West African girls aged 15 to 19 are married in West Africa–more than double the global average of 13%. This high rate exists today because statutory laws are not accepted universally. For example, even though Ghana’s Children’s Act establishes the minimum marriage age as 18 and criminalizes marriage to girls under 18, girls as young as 16 continue to be married with the consent of their parents in rural areas. Moreover, even when statutory law stipulates the right of widows and female siblings to inheritances, customary law prevents many women from accessing these rights. The Senegalese Family Code makes no distinction between men and women on the topic of inheritances, but women must often travel to urban courtrooms to have their right to inheritance recognized. This effectively bars the majority of Senegalese women from accessing familial money after a death or divorce. 
• Physical Integrity Rights: Despite recent waves of legislation against gender-based violence (GBV), it remains a pervasive issue in West Africa. At least 41.7% of all women aged 15-49 in West Africa had experienced some type of gender-based interpersonal violence as of 2020. One example of the gap between statutory and customary rights is the Nigerien Penal Code. This legislation criminalizes rape, domestic violence, and sexual assault with heavy fines and prison sentences, yet many women do not report GBV to authorities for fear of stigma and social ostracization. These Nigerien women also lack adequate access to legal retribution if they report violence in customary courts. 
• Access to Property and Financial Resources: Since the colonial era, women in West African countries have been stripped of land and property rights through customary law. This gap between statutory and customary rights is especially observable in Nigeria. Under Nigerian statutory law, women have the right to acquire and dispose of property before or after marriage and have an equal right to a share of family property in the case of divorce. However, several regions of the country adhere to different variations of customary and religious law, ranging from forbidding women to dispose of property without male consent to prohibiting women to possess property altogether. 
• Civil Liberties: While only a portion of West African countries have explicit legislation protecting many dimensions of women’s rights, women’s right to vote is universally guaranteed under statutory law. Because of this wide statutory protection, gaps between statutory legislation and lived experience are easy to observe. In Nigeria, Burkina Faso, Gambia, Guinea-Bissau, and Togo, social stigma and customary practices still prevent a large portion of women from accessing the vote. Moreover, many recently implemented progressive parity laws and gender quotas for political office have done little to increase women’s representation. For example, Mali has implemented 30% quotas for female representation in party election lists and high-level government appointments, yet social attitudes and constraints on married women have maintained low representation in decision-making political bodies.

Grassroots Social Norms Change 

Given the clash between statutory laws and customary practices, efforts to promote women’s rights must be endogenous to local communities to be relevant and sustainable. West African women are not passive victims to policy; they are agents of change and critical actors in bridging the gap between their statutory and customary rights. Today, several West African grassroots organizations work to spread awareness about women’s rights in communities where customary law may tolerate abuse. One such organization is Ligue LIFE, a Beninese group whose awareness campaigns about child trafficking and domestic violence are being adapted and disseminated by the UN Democracy Fund. Another successful organization is Project Alert on Violence Against Women, created in 1999 by female activists in Nigeria. Project Alert administers school and church-based advocacy programs that partner with local schools and places of worship to train parents, teachers, and religious leaders how to recognize and respond to GBV. By taking a bottom-up approach to social norms change, these grassroots initiatives and others like them help to bridge the gap between women’s rights under customs and women’s rights under statutory law in West Africa.

Conclusion

While this article has illuminated the wide gap between West African women’s customary and statutory rights, it is important to note that not all statutory policies in West Africa are ineffective. Some laws have effected remarkable change, such as Senegal’s 2011 Gender Parity Law that increased female representation in the national government from 22.7% to 42.7% over one election cycle. Unfortunately, not all West African statutory policies have created such concrete change in the lives of women. Thus, it is critically important to consider how women’s rights as outlined by law and as experienced by women differ in everyday life. Moving forward, it seems that grassroots social norms change is a crucial tool in bridging this difference, especially when spearheaded by West African women who have the most to lose if the gap between customary and statutory rights remains.