African Feminist Futures Beyond the UN Workshop Industrial Complex

Despite the United Nations’ workshop and log-frame fabrication of a particular kind of African woman who can be measured, trained and displayed for prime-time news, African women’s organizing has always exceeded these scripts. This decolonial feminist politics is both the product of 80 years of UN gender politics and its most potent challenger, pointing toward futures where empowerment becomes obsolete because African women already hold power in their own right.

This year, 2025, the United Nations (UN) turns eighty. For African women, the anniversary may invoke paradoxical emotions. On one hand, the influence of African women’s organizing on policy discourse is a cause for celebration. On the other hand, African women are still forced to grapple with the unrelenting continuities of power that have shaped their participation from the very beginning. While the UN remains a critical avenue for African feminist diplomacy, its ‘empowerment project’ on the continent has been an impediment to true structural transformation.

Across South Africa, Liberia and Sierra Leone, National Action Plans (NAPs) under UN Security Council Resolution 1325 have generated endless workshops but little redistribution of power. The ‘woman participant’ of UN workshops is a fabrication of donor discourse. She is vulnerable, trainable, and perpetually in need of capacity building. Such practices do not merely represent gender—they produce it. In privileging ‘women’ as a policy category, the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda reproduces subject positions of victimhood and peace-building competence while sidelining other axes of power such as race, class, and sexuality.

Rather than evaluating the effectiveness of specific UN policy initiatives, I choose to interrogate the productive power of the UN’s workshop industrial complex and the donor-driven model it sustains. I ask, how do workshops, log-frames, and indicators function to fabricate a particular kind of African woman who can be measured, trained, and displayed for prime-time news?