RWAMREC at the LEAP Africa Dissemination Webinar: Engaging Men as Accountable Allies for Women's Political Leadership

On Wednesday, 10 June 2026, Fidèle Rutayisire — Founder and Executive Director of the Rwanda Men's Resource Centre (RWAMREC) — joined the LEAP Africa Dissemination Webinar Series 2.0 as a panellist for its second edition, Who Gets to Lead? Gender, Power, and Political Decision-Making in Africa.

The webinar brought together researchers, policymakers, gender advocates, and practitioners from across the continent to interrogate a question that goes far beyond representation in numbers: who actually holds power, who has access to it, and whose interests are served when decisions are made.

The conversation we need

Convened by LEAP Africa and streamed live on Zoom and YouTube, the session drew on emerging research on women's political participation in Nigeria, situating it within a broader continental and global frame. The keynote address was delivered by Dr. Adaora Onyechere Sydney-Jack, Executive Director of Gender Strategy Advancement International (GSAI), with panel contributions from Abosede George-Ogan (WILAN Global, Nigeria), Wanjiku Thiga (Gears for Change Initiative, Kenya), and Fidèle Rutayisire (RWAMREC, Rwanda). The session was moderated by Zigwai Tagwai, founder of Zaza Development Initiative.

The webinar's framing was deliberately structural. Rather than defaulting to the familiar metrics of seats held and quotas met, it asked what representation without influence actually looks like — and what it would take to move from formal access to substantive political power.

RWAMREC's perspective: men as part of the solution

Fidèle Rutayisire's participation reflects a dimension of this debate that is too often absent from mainstream gender and governance conversations: the role of men in enabling or obstructing women's political leadership, and the institutional norms of masculinity that make politics a hostile space for women in the first place.

RWAMREC's work across Rwanda and the wider region has long held that gender equality in leadership is not a women's issue alone. Political gatekeeping, party financing structures, and the social equation of leadership with masculinity are mechanisms sustained by men — and they can only be transformed with men actively engaged in dismantling them. Rwanda's record of over 63% women in parliament did not emerge from goodwill alone; it was the product of deliberate constitutional architecture, gender quotas, and a political culture shaped by strong civic society pressure — including the sustained work of organisations like RWAMREC in shifting the norms that determine who communities accept as leaders.

The panel discussion explored Rwanda as a case study: what drove the change, and what are its limits. It examined the role of women's associations and civil society in Rwanda's post-1994 transformation, the critiques of representation achieved within a constrained political context, and what lessons are genuinely transferable — and which are not — to countries like Nigeria and Kenya operating under very different conditions.

From policy to practice

Across the panel, discussion returned to the gap between policy commitments and implementation realities. Kenya's 2010 Constitution contains some of the continent's strongest gender provisions, including the two-thirds gender principle — a provision that has never been enforced. Nigeria, despite significant activity in women's leadership development, ranks 143rd out of 144 countries on political empowerment according to the World Economic Forum's 2025 Global Gender Gap Report. These are not failures of individual ambition. They are failures of political will, party culture, and institutional design.

Innovative strategies — women's political caucuses, mentorship pipelines, independent campaign financing, digital advocacy, and male allyship — were discussed as part of a more honest reckoning with what systemic change actually requires.

Why RWAMREC's voice matters in this space

RWAMREC's participation in a continental forum of this calibre underscores something important: gender equality in governance is not achieved by working with women in isolation. It requires transforming the structures that men built, the cultures that men maintain, and the institutions that continue to treat leadership as a masculine domain. That is the work RWAMREC has been doing for over two decades — and it is precisely the kind of evidence-based, norm-challenging perspective that conversations like this one need.