Femicide in Africa: From Eastern DRC to Cameroon and South Africa, the Violence Against Women Demands Attention

Across the continent, violence against women takes different forms — from intimate-partner killings to conflict-related sexual violence. Recent cases in Cameroon, eastern Democratic Republic of Congo and South Africa expose both the scale of the crisis and the gaps that remain in protection, justice and reliable data.

Violence against women is not confined to one African country, one culture or one set of circumstances.

In eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, women are facing sexual violence and killings amid armed conflict. In Cameroon, recent killings have renewed concern over femicide and domestic violence. And in South Africa, the discovery of multiple murdered women around Ekurhuleni has once again placed the country's long-running gender-based violence crisis at the centre of national attention.

The situations are different and should not be collapsed into a single statistic. But together, they reveal an uncomfortable reality: women and girls continue to face extreme forms of violence across the continent.

The wider figures are stark. According to the latest joint estimates from UN Women and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, approximately 83,000 women and girls were intentionally killed worldwide in 2024. Around 50,000 were killed by intimate partners or other family members — an average of 137 every day. Africa had the highest estimated regional rate of intimate-partner or family-related killings, at approximately three victims per 100,000 women and girls.

Eastern DRC: when violence against women becomes a weapon of conflict

The situation in eastern DRC requires particular care when discussing the term femicide. Many of the atrocities occurring there take place within an armed conflict and are documented as conflict-related sexual violence, civilian killings and other grave human-rights violations, rather than being systematically classified as femicide.

Following the escalation of fighting around Goma in early 2025, the United Nations reported an extraordinary increase in sexual violence against women and girls.

Around 500 cases of sexual violence were reported in the Goma area within a single week, including more than 150 involving children. The UN stressed that these numbers represented only survivors able to reach services and were therefore unlikely to capture the full scale of the abuse.

One of the most horrific incidents came during the mass prison break at Muzenze Prison in Goma on 27 January 2025. Congolese judicial authorities reported that at least 165 female prisoners were raped by escaping male prisoners. Most of the women were subsequently killed in a fire, although the precise circumstances surrounding the fire have remained subject to investigation.

Behind those numbers are women living through a conflict in which rape, displacement, insecurity and loss have become intertwined.

Cameroon: growing concern over femicide

In Cameroon, a succession of killings in August 2026 again brought the issue of femicide into public discussion.

Human Rights Watch reported that several women were killed between 6 and 26 August, including women allegedly killed by current or former partners, with some attacks occurring in the presence of children. Cameroon’s Ministry for the Promotion of Women and the Family has itself acknowledged an increase in reported femicides since 2023 and warned that recorded cases may represent only a fraction of the true total.

The problem of measurement is significant.

Cameroon’s own 2025 situational analysis on gender-based violence recorded 76 femicide cases nationally for 2024, while also acknowledging weaknesses in the transmission of cases to central authorities. Separate local data cited by Human Rights Watch recorded 188 reported femicide cases in four departments of Douala in 2023 and 214 by the third quarter of 2024. The differing datasets demonstrate how fragmented reporting can make the true scale difficult to establish.

And without reliable reporting, prevention becomes even harder.

South Africa: millions of women report experiencing violence

South Africa presents another deeply troubling picture.

A national gender-based violence survey found that more than one third of South African women had experienced physical violence, while approximately 9.8% had experienced sexual violence. In population terms, the South African government said those findings represented around 7.3 million women who had experienced physical violence and 2.1 million who had experienced sexual violence.

Those figures describe violence and abuse, not femicide deaths — an important distinction — but they provide context for the environment in which lethal violence occurs.

Research by the South African Medical Research Council has found that 60% of women murdered in 2020/21 were killed by an intimate partner. The same research raised concerns about declining conviction rates, with fewer than one in five intimate-partner femicide cases resulting in a conviction.

And the crisis has again become painfully visible in September 2026.

By 19 September, nine women's bodies had been discovered in Ekurhuleni, east of Johannesburg, over a period of approximately two months. Police are investigating whether the killings are connected; authorities have not established that one serial killer is responsible. Several of the victims were found naked or partially clothed, and some showed indications of sexual violence.

The deaths have triggered vigils, memorial runs and renewed demands from women's organisations for greater protection and accountability.

More than numbers

Statistics are necessary. They show patterns, force institutions to recognise scale and allow societies to measure whether interventions are working.

But there is also a danger in allowing the numbers to become ordinary.

500 reported sexual-violence cases.165 female prisoners.7.3 million women.2.1 million women.Nine bodies.

Every number represents a person whose life cannot be reduced to a statistic.

Africa's violence-against-women crisis also cannot be addressed as though every country faces an identical problem. War in eastern DRC, intimate-partner violence in Cameroon and the broader gender-based violence emergency in South Africa have different drivers and require different responses.

What connects them is the right of women to live without violence — in their homes, in their communities and during conflict.

The challenge is no longer simply to acknowledge that violence exists. It is whether institutions across the continent can turn declarations, laws and promises into protection that women can actually experience in their everyday lives.