Adopted in February 2025, the African Union’s Convention on Ending Violence Against Women and Girls (CEVAWG) is the first binding continental treaty dedicated exclusively to eradicating gender-based violence. Its adoption coincides with the thirtieth anniversary of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action (Beijing + 30), offering an opportunity to evaluate Africa’s role in shaping global feminist governance. This article situates CEVAWG within the genealogy of international and regional women’s rights instruments, including CEDAW (1979), the Beijing Platform for Action (1995), and the Maputo Protocol (2003). It argues that while earlier frameworks universalized women’s rights or contextualized them in partial ways, CEVAWG advances a distinctly decolonial feminist approach. Its expansive definition of violence, intersectional protections, integration of African epistemologies, and recognition of grassroots women’s movements mark an epistemic shift. Africa emerges not as a passive recipient of global feminist norms but as an active producer of feminist international law. At the same time, the article critiques CEVAWG’s heavy reliance on state institutions and punitive justice mechanisms, warning that such state-centrism risks reproducing structural and carceral violence rather than dismantling it. Drawing on decolonial theory, the article contends that CEVAWG’s significance lies in both its promise and its tensions: it represents a transformative feminist intervention into global norm-making,yet its emancipatory potential will depend on implementation, the centering of grassroots practices, and resistance to state capture. CEVAWG, I argue, is Africa’s Beijing + 30 response; an attempt to provincialize universalist feminism and anchor gender justice in the continent’s own histories, struggles, and epistemologies.
