By Kelvin Kelya
Kuvuja kwa pakacha nafuu ya mchukuzi is a Kiswahili proverb that translates to a leaking basket reduces the burden of the carrier. At first glance, this proverb seems like a small relief for a weary traveller. But when you think again, you realise that it is calling attention to what is leaking out of the basket. Perhaps food, seeds, medicine, school fees, even the future. And who is affected by the consequences of the leakage? Almost always, a woman.
This proverb illustrates a critical economic issue in Africa: Illicit Financial Flows (IFFs). According to the High-Level Panel (HLP) Report (2014), IFFs refer to money illegally earned, transferred, or used, originating from commercial tax evasion, trade misinvoicing, abusive transfer pricing, criminal activities, and corruption. While some individuals profit from IFFs, many more suffer through state loss of resources essential for public goods such as health, education, and infrastructure. Africa is estimated to lose US$88.6 billion annually through illicit financial flows and US$7.5 billion in tax revenues from multinational corporate profit shifting and offshore wealth, while the continent’s external debt reaches approximately US$1.16 trillion (African Development Bank, 2024; UNCTAD, 2020; Tax Justice Network, 2021). Most IFF funds move to developed countries and tax havens, primarily due to organized crime (33%) and trade manipulation (64%), with only 3% related to government corruption involving multinational corporations. Such losses lead to decreased revenue for African governments, stunting development whilst compelling governments to incur more debt under poor conditions.
Tax Justice Network highlights the gender impact of IFFs on women and girls, coined as the ‘feminisation of poverty.’ This is the phenomenon where women and girls experience a disproportionately higher share of poverty compared to men. The result is higher maternal mortality rates, low school enrolment and early marriages that push women into unpaid care work and informal employment. These issues affect women and girls across their lifetimes, from birth to adulthood. The Tax Justice Network reveals that 62.8% of the world’s poorest women and girls reside in sub-Saharan Africa, and African women spend significantly more time engaged in unpaid and domestic work compared to men across the continent.
But here’s the thing that the data doesn’t always reflect: women are not just the first victims of IFFs. They are also the most determined, most resourceful, and most community-oriented fighters against IFFs. At the heart of this fight are African feminist and women’s funds organizations that see the fight against IFFs as tied to the fight for gender justice.
The Stop the Bleeding Campaign: the beginning of the fight against IFFs
“Stop the Bleeding” is the campaign that was launched in 2015 by a coalition of African civil society organizations, led by FEMNET alongside Tax Justice Network Africa, Third World Network Africa, AFRODAD, ITUC-Africa, and TrustAfrica. It is one of the continent’s most coordinated efforts to end IFFs.
Tax Justice Network Africa partners closely with its members and other civil society partners across Africa to tackle IFFs and promote fair tax systems, with a focus on pro-poor policies and on strengthening tax systems to improve domestic resource mobilization. The tools used are becoming more effective. An Anti-IFFs Policy Tracker was created to monitor the implementation of policies aimed at reducing illicit financial flows from Africa. This collaborative tool was developed by Tax Justice Network Africa, the African Union, and the Africa Tax Administration Forum. The tracker is important because it turns advocacy into accountability. It shifts the conversation from “Africa is losing money” to “here is exactly which country, which policy gap, and which institution is allowing this to continue.”
For the coalition of African organisations to achieve their desired results, they all have to take responsibility to ensure that they are advocating against IFFs from where they are operating, rather than leaving the responsibility to the Tax Justice Network alone. The next sections will explore how other African organizations are plugging the leak.
The African Women’s Development and Communication Network (FEMNET): Linking IFFs to inequality, gender injustice, and development deficits
Illicit financial flows (IFFs) adversely affect millions of women in Africa through decreased funding for essential services. From a feminist economic justice perspective, the African Women’s Development and Communication Network (FEMNET) links financial losses to gender inequality and development stagnation. By reframing IFFs as a human rather than a technical issue, FEMNET emphasizes the urgency of the situation, calls for fair taxation policies, and urges the incorporation of feminist analysis into the discourse on financial governance. Their efforts include building capacity among activists and women’s participation in economic decision-making processes, thereby reshaping how policies on taxation and economic justice are formed.
The African Women’s Development and Communication Network (FEMNET) advocates for linking illicit financial flows (IFFs) to women’s rights, viewing the issue as a feminist concern rather than purely financial. FEMNET emphasizes that addressing IFFs requires collaboration among governments, civil society, and women’s rights groups to combat economic injustices. At the 10th Pan African Conference on IFFs and Tax in Lusaka, Zambia, FEMNET highlighted the need for gender-fair macroeconomic policies and gender-responsive budgeting. FEMNET asserts that the fight against IFFs transcends technical discussions, necessitating action in communities, parliaments, and individual mindsets.
Tax Justice Network Africa: Tax Justice Is Gender Justice
IFFs rob billions of dollars from Africa every year, which in turn slows down development and weakens service delivery to communities. In response, the Tax Justice Network Africa has built a powerful two-part strategy anchored in the African Parliamentary Network on Illicit Financial Flows and Taxation (APNIFFT), and the Pan-African Conference on Illicit Financial Flows and Taxation. While PAC convenes governments, civil society, and experts to shape ideas, share research, and build continental consensus, APNIFFT translates that momentum into real political action by equipping Members of Parliament to draft laws, strengthen oversight, and push for transparency. This combination ensures that conversations about tax justice do not end in conference halls but move directly into policy and legislation.
The results are increasingly visible across the continent. Tax Justice Network, under its flagship umbrella APNIFFT, has managed to mobilize and train parliamentarians to influence tax reforms, promote beneficial ownership transparency, and hold governments accountable for revenue losses. On the other hand, the PAC has emerged as Africa’s leading platform for shaping the global tax justice agenda, amplifying African voices in international debates and building a united front against financial secrecy and exploitation. Together, these platforms are not only creating awareness, but also actively strengthening Africa’s ability to retain its own wealth for development.
The Association for Women’s Rights in Development (AWID): Addressing the Disproportionate Impact of IFFs on Gender Justice
AWID works to curb illicit financial flows (IFFs) by highlighting their disproportionate impact on gender justice and advocating for feminist economic policies. AWID believes that the gender impacts of IFFs are often understood and studied at the national and even local levels, with scarce literature focusing on the global impact of IFFs as an obstacle to the realization of women’s rights and gender justice. AWID therefore has published research on the gendered impact of IFFs, including a 2017 policy brief titled “Illicit Financial Flows: Why we should claim these resources for gender, economic and social justice.” In the policy brief, AWID highlighted the specific disproportionate impacts of IFFs on gender justice, including the effects on the delivery of social services to women, unemployment, and a threat to women’s peace and security.
Moreover, in the policy brief, AWID outlined seven policy recommendations for advocacy:
- Address IFFs as a violation of human rights and women’s rights,
- Ensure multinational corporations pay their share,
- Support the establishment of a United Nations intergovernmental tax body,
- Promote transparency and gender-sensitive data gathering,
- Promote tax justice through progressive fiscal policies at the national level,
- Ensure participation of women’s rights organizations, social movements and progressive civil society broadly and
- Stop the impunity of criminal activities associated with IFFs and ensure accountability.
With all these efforts, AWID has managed to raise worldwide awareness about the gendered consequences of IFFs, influencing policy discussion, creating widely utilized feminist economic research, and strengthening the capacity of feminist movements to advocate for economic and financial justice. The fight against IFFs is continuous and multifaceted, but AWID’s work has been crucial in ensuring these flows are recognized as a fundamental impediment to gender equality and women’s rights.
The Africa Feminist Macroeconomic Academy (AFMA): Training Future Tax Advocates
In August 2025, the Africa Feminist Macroeconomic Academy (AFMA) in Accra, Ghana, emphasized the importance of feminist approaches to enhance Africa’s tax systems. Organized by FEMNET with various partners, the academy’s theme was “A Feminist Approach to Tax Justice: Reclaiming Public Resources for Gender and Economic Justice.” It aimed at transforming the structures that perpetuate inequality. Participants gained practical tools for advocating feminist tax justice, including strategies for media engagement, evidence-based research, community mobilization, targeted lobbying, and coalition building.
The African Women’s Development Fund (AWDF): Resourcing the Revolution
Since 2000, the African Women’s Development Fund (AWDF) has allocated over USD 100 million to over 1,500 organizations advocating for gender justice in Africa. In 2025, it granted over USD 12 million to initiatives focused on challenging discriminatory laws, promoting women’s leadership, and fostering solidarity. AWDF’s approach emphasizes strategic investment, particularly through Economic Justice Grants aimed at dismantling economic barriers for women and gender-diverse individuals. However, funding challenges persist, with cuts to Official Development Assistance in 2025 and a shortage of resources for feminist organizations, as noted in AWID’s report, revealing that many groups lack secure funding and could barely sustain their operations. This highlights the paradox of resource-strapped organizations fighting against the systemic inequalities depriving Africa of its wealth.
As a premier grant-maker, AWDF has shifted its funding strategy to support “Economic Justice” as a core pillar. In the 2024-2026 funding cycle, AWDF increased its allocations for “Tax and Fiscal Justice” by 30%, specifically targeting women-led organizations that monitor corporate tax dodging in the extractive industries (mining and oil). AWDF funds “Feminist Economics Summer Schools,” training activists to analyze complex financial statements to identify “misinvoicing,” a primary method of IFFs (Netshisaulu, 2024).
TrustAfrica: Bringing Marginalized Voices Forward
TrustAfrica addresses critical issues such as illicit financial flows and resource extraction by incorporating previously overlooked voices. The organization supports smallholder agriculture, with a focus on women farmers, and advocates for transparency, accountability, and equity in natural resource management, emphasizing the importance of fair taxation and the reduction of illicit financial flows. Moreover, TrustAfrica is providing financial support for specialized research, including the approval of grants to support the Illicit Financial Flows Observatory for Africa project, managed by the Southern Africa Research and Documentation Center (SARDC). SARDC’s Illicit Financial Flows Observatory for Africa developed the Illicit Financial Flows Database, which tracks research and policies on Africa’s financial leakages. SARDC’s research highlights IFFs’ detrimental effects on economic growth, driven by weak regulations and corruption, whilst advocating for transparency and regional cooperation to combat IFFs and promote sustainable development in Africa.
Conclusion
The 2022 UNCTAD report estimates that reducing IFFs could close Africa’s financial gap by 33%. Furthermore, addressing illicit capital flight could generate enough funds by 2030 to meet nearly half of the $2.4 trillion needed for climate change adaptation in sub-Saharan Africa. Women’s funds, feminist networks, and tax justice coalitions are effectively leading recovery efforts despite limited resources.
Africa is not impoverished but is being exploited through systematic and legal means, primarily by corporations listed on major stock exchanges. These practices result in illicit financial flows that deny billions a better future, eroding public trust and worsening poverty.
However, women’s funds and initiatives are actively challenging this situation by organizing, campaigning, and seeking accountability. The messaging is clear: tackling illicit financial flows is crucial to addressing inequality and injustice, and it necessitates collaboration among governments, civil society, and women’s rights groups. Despite ongoing challenges, women remain determined to mend the broken systems.