Haiti’s transitional government is promising to restore democracy, human rights, and stability after years of crisis, but in practice it is excluding women and ignoring their distinct needs. It is thus on course to perpetuate long-standing patterns of discrimination that have historically left Haiti’s women at the margins of public life and made them objects of endemic gender-based violence (GBV). Global experience indicates that this policy failing will also weaken Haiti’s transition as a whole.
Haitian feminist and human rights activists are fighting back with a proposed Policy Framework for an Effective and Equitable Transition that identifies established legal rights, obligations, and best practices necessitating women’s inclusion in Haiti’s transition, and offers concrete recommendations for corrections to the exclusionary policies adopted by the transitional government to date.
The Framework’s urgent adoption is imperative. If implemented, it will help to preserve the transition as a mechanism for stabilising democracy and sustainable development while advancing women’s rights in Haiti.
An ongoing tradition of neglecting women
Discrimination against women and girls has always been a feature of Haitian society, including as a legacy of abuse towards Black women’s bodies born of colonialism and enslavement. Women and girls face added barriers to education, accessing funds and resources, and participating in the formal economy. They have been kept out of positions of authority and political leadership. Indeed, Haiti has had one of the lowest levels of women’s political representation in the world, often suppressed by targeted violence. Pervasive patriarchal and discriminatory stereotypes exacerbate such structural barriers through expectations around family roles, gendered activities, and permissive attitudes towards GBV. These patterns enable pervasive gendered violence and are in turn deepened by it. Impunity has been the norm.
Women and girls are also the majority of those displaced by the conflict, with accompanying heightened exposure to sexual violence and sexual exploitation and abuse.
In Haiti’s ongoing crisis, these inequities have rendered Haiti’s women and girls distinctly vulnerable. Armed groups have deployed widespread and increasingly brutal sexual violence against them as a means of terror and territorial control. This leaves women’s public activities – including for earning a living or accessing medical care – especially restricted. Maternal mortality has increased. Women and girls are also the majority of those displaced by the conflict, with accompanying heightened exposure to sexual violence and sexual exploitation and abuse. In some cases, scarce humanitarian assistance is conditioned on sexual favours or aggression, and sexual violence is deliberately deployed to impede access.
These unaddressed harms, deepened by the gendered brutality of the crisis, are a gross violation of the rights of more than half of Haiti’s population. Haiti’s constitution enshrines the equality of women including – explicitly – their right to participate fully in the central affairs of their nation and hold public office. It likewise makes international laws safeguarding women’s rights – including to be free from violence and discrimination, to have judicial recourse, and to enjoy equal dignity and opportunity – the laws of the land.
Yet even as Haiti’s transitional government and its international partners assert a commitment to restoring a rights-based democracy, their actions are compounding, rather than addressing these harms and violations. Women are being excluded from decision-making: There is only one woman on Haiti’s nine-member Transitional Presidential Council (CPT), and she is one of two members with no vote. No women were interviewed for the role of interim prime minister, and the names being floated for the Provisional Electoral Council (CEP) – which will be in charge of the elections promised for February 2026 – are almost exclusively male. Likewise, there is only one woman on the new nine-member commission on criminal reform, which is empowered to revisit laws that Haiti’s women’s movement has been trying to change for years in order to protect women and girls from GBV, tackle discrimination, and legalise abortion.
And even where women are present – four were appointed ministers in the transitional cabinet after human rights groups denounced this pattern – there doesn't seem to be any accompanying commitment to foster women’s rights and leadership. The denial of authority to the sole woman on the CPT is particularly on the nose, as inclusion without authority is just tokenism. Equally pernicious is inclusion without substantive integration of the women’s rights agenda, which is ultimately just lip service – or pretence.
For example, the female ministers, whatever their other qualifications, lack material grounding in the Haitian women’s movement and none of the members of the commission on criminal reform appear to be connected to the long-standing efforts at legal reform in line with promoting women’s rights. Substantive discussion of women’s political engagement or priorities around tackling GBV and other issues distinctly impacting Haiti’s women and girls are almost entirely absent from major public statements by members of the transitional government. And the interim minister on the status of women and women’s rights has stated that she wishes to convert her mandate into one focused on families. This is at best a dilution of the ministry’s critical mission, hard fought for by the women’s movement. At worst, it plays into the very stereotypes and exclusions driving women’s inequality in Haiti. If this pattern continues, Haiti risks missing opportunities to protect them, or even reversing gains in fostering women’s equality.
Haitian women fight back
But Haiti’s women have never been passive victims. The Haitian women’s movement has long organised to advance women’s dignity and equality. And Haitian women are doing so again.
Over 140 feminist and human rights groups from Haiti, together with solidarity partners from around the world, have responded to these failings by putting together a Policy Framework that identifies the well-established rights and best practices applicable to Haiti’s transition and recommends tangible steps to correct these damaging policies and bolster the effectiveness of Haiti’s transition.
The recommendations include, among others, the urgent need to establish a 30% baseline for women's participation and leadership in ministerial and monitoring institutions, in entities charged with organising elections, and in the commission on criminal reform. The Framework also calls for a significant increase of the budget for issues affecting women and girls, including the ministry on the status of women and women’s rights, which currently receives only 0.1% of Haiti’s budget. Taking immediate measures, such as strengthening specialised police units addressing GBV, ensuring better trauma-sensitive assistance for survivors, as well as improving investigation and prosecution of related claims is also paramount.
Haiti’s international partners, in spite of public laments regarding the challenges Haiti’s women and girls are facing, and a willingness to opine on many other aspects of the transition, have been shockingly silent about the unlawful and counterproductive exclusion of women and the marginalisation of their distinct needs.
All the Framework’s recommendations reflect the long-standing priorities of Haiti’s women’s movement and the well-established global consensus that centering these priorities during conflict-affected transitions results in better, more sustainable outcomes, and that gender equality is correlated with more robust democracies and economic development in the long term.
Women’s rights advocates presented the Framework to interim Prime Minister Garry Conille weeks ago. But even as his office highlighted photos from what it called “an important meeting”, tangible actions have been lacking. This latest instance of letting down Haiti’s women is an urgent concern, as the transitional government faces growing pressure to finalise the CEP and other institutions that will be critical to shaping Haiti’s future and determining whether it will break with past gendered harms.
Haiti’s international partners, in spite of public laments regarding the challenges Haiti’s women and girls are facing, and a willingness to opine on many other aspects of the transition, have been shockingly silent about the unlawful and counterproductive exclusion of women and the marginalisation of their distinct needs. For example, human rights advocates highlighted related concerns to the CARICOM Eminent Persons Group – appointed last May to facilitate dialogue with the Haitian transitional government – during their August visit to Haiti. Yet the group’s final statement made no mention of women’s rights and the exclusion of women from transition leadership, even as they underlined other reported critiques.
The transitional government and its international partners owe Haiti’s women and girls more. And Haiti’s transition will only succeed if it makes space for this overdue transformation.
The IJDH and Nègès Mawon are among the organisations that drafted the Policy Framework for an Effective and Equitable Transition.
