Day for Women and Girls of African Descent and African Women’s Day

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I cannot believe I am only getting a chance to post this at the beginning of September 2026! But I am very pleased that my coming back post is about celebrating African women and girls and women and girls of African descent!

What happens in July of every year?

July is a month of celebrating, remembering and honouring African women and girls, and women and girls of African descent. 25 July has been marked as the UN International Day for Women and Girls of African Descent, proclaimed in 2024 and celebrated for the first time on 25 July 2025. July 2026 was its second year of commemoration. The day, however, did not come out of nowhere; it coincides with the Day of Afro-Latino, Afro-Caribbean and Diaspora Women, which is commemorated every year on 25 July. That day came about when, in 1992, women from over 30 Latin American and Caribbean countries came together to define advocacy strategies to improve their quality of life and to eradicate racism and discrimination from a gender perspective. The commemoration is still going strong to date.

On 31 July every year, International African Women’s Day (also known as Pan-African Women’s Day) is observed. It too is the fruit of a significant meeting, held in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, on 31 July 1962. The women there pushed for the Pan-African Women’s Organization (PAWO) to be recognised by African leaders. The organisation had existed since the 1940s, fighting colonialism and apartheid and campaigning for the human rights of all African peoples. Its goal is now to address the socio-economic, developmental and political challenges with a view to finding African solutions themselves (Sisi Wenyewe), for a totally politically and economically independent Africa.

Why should we know these dates?

The dates and commemorative moments mentioned above are not widely known. When I posted on the instagram page of this blog in remembrance of the first one – 25 July, I received many comments by people saying they had never heard of it. That invites reflection on why this is so, and on the implications of what these commemoration aim to achieve. These are not passive dates of commemoration; they have been earmarked to achieve important aims ranging from anti-racism and anti-discrimination to gender equality, economic emancipation, and the realisation and enjoyment of human rights. This is work that requires everyone, not only African women and girls and those of African descent. But it is difficult to work with a lack of awareness.

These dates and what they bring need to be well known and celebrated across the globe to inspire collective effort to challenge structures and systems that keep fuelling precarity for African women and girls and those of African descent. They are found in every part of the world, and across many of those contexts they remain at the top of the data on marginalisation: over-represented in poverty, faring worst on wider socio-economic measures, and still more likely to die in childbirth.

The amazing voices of African women and girls and those of African descent

Women and girls of African descent have been and still are making their mark on the world. They are innovators, artists, educators, scientists, leaders, and so much more. They do not need saving; they need equitable protection of their rights like any other women and girls around the world. They need systems that meet them at their humanity, with dignity and love: systems that believe them rather than vilify them, professionals who check their bias, and structures that ensure they do not only survive but thrive and that, most importantly, include and respect their voices.

One important way that women of African descent have been telling their stories is through literature, communicating their conditions in society through writing: books such as So Long a Letter by Mariama Bâ, Second Class Citizen by Buchi Emecheta, The Wife’s Tale by Aida Edemariam and Unbowed by Wangari Maathai. They have been telling their histories through historical fiction, such as Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, The Shadow King by Maaza Mengiste, Kibogo by Scholastique Mukasonga, The Island of Forgetting by Jasmine Sealy and Praise Song for the Widow by Paule Marshall.

They have written about love in the African context through anthologies such as African Love Stories, and about their lives in the diaspora, surviving in between worlds and adapting to foreign lands, or in their own lands in the so-called post-colonial era. Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory, Andrea Levy’s Small Island, Manchester Happened by Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi, We Need New Names by NoViolet Bulawayo, Tsitsi Dangarembga’s trilogy – Nervous Conditions, The Book of Not and This Mournable Body – and Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo are some of the books that do this well.

They have also written about slavery, and the conditions that continue even after the legal abolition of the transatlantic slave trade, such as In the Wake by Christina Sharpe and Beloved by Toni Morrison. They are writing Afrofuturist fantasies, such as Death of the Author by Nnedi Okorafor and Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi. There is no topic that women of African descent have not written about. Black feminism, for instance, is filled with giants like Audre Lorde, bell hooks, Angela Davis, Patricia Hill Collins, Kimberlé Crenshaw and Sylvia Tamale, who theorised and gave the world a lens through which to understand the systemic oppression that women and girls of African descent face.

Concluding remarks

Commemorating the Day for Women and Girls of African Descent and International African Women’s Day is therefore not only an opportunity to remember and learn, but also to work together to dismantle systems that keep women and girls of African descent in perpetual disenfranchisement, marginalisation and precarity. Books are part of that work. They are the voices that have long been ignored. Reading them is an act of love, support and resistance that is long overdue. I encourage everyone to read them, buy them, request them in your library, teach them, and pass them on. Let us work for a world where women and girls of African descent are equitably protected, cared for and loved, and where they not only survive, but thrive.

Reflective prompt for readers: what action will you take right now to support, love, appreciate, protect, encourage an African woman or girl or those of African descent or both today?