Accra, Ghana, November 7, 2026: There is something peculiar about the way society responds to women and the things that concern them. We celebrate women’s independence until they make choices we disagree with. We praise their resilience while leaving them to navigate systems that repeatedly fail them. We tell them they can have it all, then question their decisions when the reality becomes complicated.
This week, I found myself returning to one question: when did women’s freedom become everyone else’s problem?
Consider what has been happening.
In Ghana, members of the opposition New Patriotic Party’s Women’s Wing took to the streets of Obuasi on Friday 6 November, carrying placards that read “Justice for Our Girls”. Led by National Women’s Organiser Mavis Hawa Koomson, the demonstrators demanded justice for 19 female students at Obuasi Senior High Technical School who have allegedly been sexually abused by their headmaster. The headmaster has been interdicted and arrested, and the case is with the Criminal Investigations Department (CID). He denies the allegations, and none has been tested in court.
The demonstration brought the allegations back into the national conversation, but it also raised a question that should trouble every parent, educator and policymaker: why must the protection of schoolgirls require a public demonstration before the country fully confronts what has happened? Koomson has now given the government 14 days to respond or face a bigger march in Accra.
What happens to the girls after the cameras leave? Who ensures that they receive appropriate support, that their education is not disrupted and that they are protected from intimidation? What happens to the institutional structures that should have prevented such allegations from arising in the first place?
We cannot keep treating the protection of girls as an emergency response rather than an institutional responsibility. A school should not become a place where a girl has to negotiate her safety with someone who holds authority over her education.
And while we are asking questions about the protection of women’s bodies, another disturbing story has been spreading across parts of our continent.
When a rumour becomes a death sentence
Across countries including Tanzania, Mozambique, Kenya, Zambia, Malawi and the Democratic Republic of Congo, claims that a man’s genitals can disappear or shrink following a simple touch from a stranger have circulated rapidly on social media.
The claims are false. Yet the consequences have been deadly.
A September 2026 investigation by the BBC’s Global Disinformation Unit found that more than 80 people were killed between October 2025 and July 2026 following accusations of genital theft across six African countries. In Mozambique, police reported 55 deaths in six weeks at the height of the panic. A police officer, health workers and civil servants were among the dead. In Kenya, five people were killed in mob attacks.
Videos showing distressed men, accusations and crowds attacking alleged perpetrators have circulated on TikTok and Facebook. The footage gives unverified claims an appearance of credibility, while the platforms through which they spread have struggled to contain the damage.
This is not an entirely unfamiliar story to Ghanaians.
In 1997, Ghana experienced a similar wave of genital-theft rumours that resulted in mob attacks and lynchings. In March and April 2024, the country experienced another resurgence, particularly around Kasoa, Awutu Senya and parts of the Eastern Region. Police made arrests, but no missing genitalia were proven.
The difference today is the speed and reach of social media. A rumour that might once have travelled through neighbourhood conversations can now cross borders through a video, a WhatsApp message or a TikTok post. Someone watching an attack thousands of kilometres away may interpret the footage as evidence that the alleged phenomenon is real.
But beyond the misinformation lies a more uncomfortable question.
Why does a rumour involving male sexual organs so quickly mobilise crowds into violence? Why are people prepared to attack and kill strangers over something that has no medical basis? And why do platforms that can distribute these videos to enormous audiences struggle to prevent their continued circulation?
There is also a gendered dimension worth examining. Women and other vulnerable people can become targets when communities look for someone to blame for their fears. The accusations are not always directed at men. The broader danger is the ease with which an already vulnerable person can be turned into a scapegoat.
We cannot discuss digital freedom without discussing digital responsibility. Nor can we pretend that online misinformation is harmless entertainment when people are dying offline.
The question is not whether Africa should abandon social media. It is whether the companies making money from our attention are prepared to take responsibility for the consequences of what their platforms amplify.
Has feminism failed women?
Now, let us cross the Atlantic.
A British columnist, Petronella Wyatt, has reignited an old argument with a column declaring that feminism has failed her generation. Her piece, published in the Daily Mail in May 2024, has found a fresh audience on social media.
Wyatt describes herself and a circle of highly educated professional women in their mid-50s who are single and childless. She argues that they grew up being encouraged to prioritise careers, financial independence and professional achievement, sometimes at the expense of marriage and motherhood.
She recalls being made to feel that marriage was an undesirable ambition and that traditional femininity was something educated women should reject. Looking at her life and those of her friends, she questions whether the feminism they were taught prepared them for the lives they eventually found themselves living.
Her conclusion is blunt: feminism failed her generation.
I find this argument worth engaging with, not because I agree with her conclusion, but because it raises questions that feminists should not be afraid to confront.
What if a woman genuinely regrets not having children? What if she spent years pursuing professional success and now wishes she had invested more time in companionship? What if financial independence has not delivered the happiness she expected?
Must we dismiss her experience because it does not fit the feminist narrative?
Absolutely not.
Women should be allowed to want marriage, motherhood, careers, financial independence or some combination of these things. They should also be allowed to change their minds. Feminism should not become another institution prescribing how women must live.
But I disagree with the suggestion that women’s disappointments are evidence of feminism’s failure.
Did feminism promise that every woman would find a partner? Did it promise that professional success would eliminate loneliness? Or did it argue that women should not have to depend on marriage for economic survival, that they should have access to education and work, and that motherhood should not automatically end their professional ambitions?
There is a difference between having choices and having the conditions to make those choices work.
A woman may want children but struggle to reconcile motherhood with an unforgiving workplace. Another may want marriage but find that the expectation to compromise, care and maintain the relationship remains disproportionately hers. A third may choose not to marry and still find herself judged for that decision.
Perhaps the question we should be asking is not whether feminism has failed women, but whether society has changed sufficiently to accommodate the freedoms women have fought for.
Why is childcare still treated largely as a woman’s responsibility? Why are workplaces still structured around the assumption that somebody else is taking care of the home? Why is a woman who chooses a career accused of neglecting family, while a man pursuing the same career is rarely subjected to the same scrutiny?
And why do we keep treating marriage and motherhood as proof of a woman’s successful life?
A woman can be single and fulfilled. She can be married and unhappy. She can be a mother and ambitious. She can be childless and wish things had turned out differently.
All these experiences can coexist without becoming a referendum on feminism.
The problem begins when one woman’s experience is used to question the right of millions of other women to make different choices.
When representation becomes a measure of progress
While the argument about feminism continues in Britain, women in the United States have just emerged from the 3 November midterm elections with a number of historic political breakthroughs.
The elections produced significant firsts for women. Deb Haaland will become New Mexico’s first Native American woman governor, Gina Hinojosa Texas’s first Latina governor, and Keisha Lance Bottoms Georgia’s first Black woman governor. Women were also elected to other significant political offices across the country.
According to the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University, voters in 17 states elected women governors, setting a new record. The same count shows the picture is not uniformly positive: it projects 139 women in the next Congress, down from 152 today.
These achievements matter. Representation matters because the institutions making decisions about people’s lives should not systematically exclude the people affected by those decisions.
But I have another question.
Does having more women in political office automatically mean that women are better represented in policy, budgets and public institutions?
A woman occupying a powerful position does not necessarily mean that every woman benefits from her leadership. Representation is an important starting point, but it must be accompanied by accountability, meaningful participation and policies that address structural inequalities.
We should celebrate women breaking political barriers while continuing to ask what their presence changes for women who do not have access to those corridors of power.
Who benefits from the decisions being made? Whose experiences inform policy? And how do we measure progress beyond the number of women who have made it into the room?
Twenty-six years of feminist organising. What comes next?
Back home on the continent, Accra has been hosting conversations about precisely these questions.
The 10th Africa Women Conference took place from 4 to 6 November under the theme A Decade of Impact: From Commitments to Action. The gathering brought together women, policymakers, advocates and other stakeholders to examine the advancement of justice, economic power and leadership for African women and girls.
The African Women’s Development Fund (AWDF) also marked 26 years of supporting women’s rights and feminist movements across Africa with an anniversary dinner in Accra on 4 November, under the theme The Next 26 Starts Now.
Established in 2000 by Ghana’s late Joana Foster, Uganda’s Dr Hilda Tadria and Nigeria’s Bisi Adeleye-Fayemi, AWDF was founded to mobilise resources for African women’s rights organisations.
At the anniversary gathering, Adeleye-Fayemi called for solidarity and collective action, reminding participants that women are not each other’s worst enemy, but patriarchy is.
Twenty-six years of funding, organising, advocacy and movement-building is worth recognising. African feminist organisations have helped put issues of bodily autonomy, economic justice, political participation and violence against women firmly on the public agenda.
But anniversaries should also invite difficult questions.
How much of the progress discussed in conference rooms reaches women in rural communities? How many girls know where to report abuse and can trust that their complaints will be taken seriously? How many women-led organisations have the resources to sustain their work beyond short-term project funding?
And, perhaps most importantly, how do we move from celebrating commitments to demanding measurable results?
We cannot continue to organise conferences about women’s empowerment while the institutions responsible for protecting women and girls struggle to fulfil their most basic obligations.
The next 26 years must be about more than keeping the conversation alive. They must also be about what changes in women’s everyday lives.
The question we keep avoiding
This week’s stories may appear unrelated. A demonstration in Obuasi, deadly rumours spreading across African social media, a British columnist questioning feminism, American women making political history and African feminist organisations celebrating decades of work.
But they leave us with a common thread.
We are still negotiating who has power over women’s lives, who gets to define their choices and who is expected to carry the consequences when systems fail.
We want girls to be safe, but are the institutions responsible for their protection accountable? We want women to be independent, but are our economic and social systems designed to support that independence? We celebrate women entering political office, but do we hold those institutions accountable for the lives of women outside them?
And when a woman says feminism has failed her, are we willing to listen without surrendering the larger argument about women’s freedom?
I do not believe feminism should tell women what a successful life looks like. That would simply replace one form of control with another.
But neither should we allow the language of choice to become an excuse for institutions to avoid responsibility.
Perhaps the most important question is not whether feminism has failed women.
It is whether the societies that claim to have embraced women’s equality are prepared to do the work required to make that equality real.
If women are expected to take responsibility for every choice they make, when will the men, institutions, governments and societies shaping those choices take responsibility for their part?
