“It’s surprising it’s taken us this long to recognise and think about facilitating [women’s] role. Because once you see it, you can’t unsee it,” said Nazila Ghanea, UN Special Rapporteur on freedom of religion or belief. Ghanea was referring to a conference titled “The role of women as guides and spiritual leaders in preventing violent extremism: A peer-to-peer exchange on faith and human rights”. Behind the formal title of the conference, which took place last May in Dakar, Senegal, there is a
“It’s surprising it’s taken us this long to recognise and think about facilitating [women’s] role. Because once you see it, you can’t unsee it,” said Nazila Ghanea, UN Special Rapporteur on freedom of religion or belief.
Ghanea was referring to a conference titled “The role of women as guides and spiritual leaders in preventing violent extremism: A peer-to-peer exchange on faith and human rights”. Behind the formal title of the conference, which took place last May in Dakar, Senegal, there is a straightforward argument: that women’s religious leadership may be one of the most under-used tools against violent extremism in the region.
The conference brought together religious and community leaders, human rights experts and government partners.
“Because women are at the centre of social dynamics, their role in preventing violent extremism is extremely important — they have the advantage of proximity, and the legitimacy to speak to communities,” said Fatou Dramé, sociologist and gender expert from Senegal.
“Being both a woman and a religious authority, is yet a double opportunity that must be put to use to prevent this phenomenon,” Dramé added.
The women at the centre of the Dakar meeting go by different names depending on where they work: the Mourchidates — female religious guide in Arabic — of Mauritania, trained, certified and deployed by the State through the Ministry of Islamic Affairs to counter extremist narratives directly, and the Badian Gokh — neighbourhood godmothers in Wolof — of Senegal, trusted local mediators whose role began in maternal and community health and has since extended into questions of faith and social cohesion.
“They are women and young women trained in the alternative discourse to radical, violent speech: the arguments that dismantle the radicals’ arguments,” said Aminata Couro Ly, Coordinator of the Mourchidates network project in Mauritania.
“They were deployed across all of Mauritania’s intervention zones and began raising awareness among several target groups,” she added.
Both networks predate this conference by years. The Mourchidates were established in 2021 as a partnership between Mauritania’s Ministry of Islamic Affairs and the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), which developed the training programme with the Association of Women Heads of Family — an organization Couro Ly represents. By 2022, UNODC reported the network had reached over 8,000 people, from students to former combatants and their families. It’s that existing infrastructure that the Dakar conference — organised jointly by UN Human Rights and UNODC — built on, layering the Faith for Rights framework onto years of groundwork already underway.
The Faith for Rights framework was launched by UN Human Rights in 2017 to foster peaceful societies through reflection and joint action on the deep connections between religions, beliefs and human rights.
As divine texts rely on human interpretations, the Faith for Rights commitments encourage critical thinking and debate on religion or belief. They specifically commit to revisit those religious understandings that appear to perpetuate gender inequality and harmful stereotypes or even condone gender-based violence.
“We support this through peer-to-peer learning”, said Michael Wiener, Coordinator of the Faith for Rights framework. It’s also why UN Human Rights avoids certain language when it works with faith communities directly.
“We usually don’t use the term ‘training of trainers,’ because ‘trainer’ implies a kind of hierarchy. Rather, we see it as facilitating a discussion,” Wiener said. “It’s very ‘unhierarchical’, as everyone has something to learn and something to contribute. So, our methodology is to facilitate the role of facilitators.”
Dramé said that this conference truly allowed them a different reading of what complementarity between religion and human rights means.
“I was afraid, before coming [to the conference], that we would stay on superficial, very polite exchanges,” said Kahina Bahloul, first female Imam in France since 2019. “[Instead], I saw absolutely incredible people, incredible women who have a drive, a desire — I would say the fire and the will to change things.”
But admiration wasn’t the only thing participants brought back. Repeatedly, they returned to a harder truth: the women doing this work are, in large part, unrecognised.
“These women make incredible efforts. They take incredible risks, at the expense of their own lives. And despite that, they have no institutional or official recognition. They have no official status as social actors,” Bahloul said. “They work today as volunteers, and that is simply unacceptable.”
Asked directly whether UN Human Rights views the Mourchidates and Badian Gokh as human rights defenders in their own right, Wiener didn’t hesitate.
“Yes, they are actually strengthening local action in favour of human rights,” he said. “We need such a bottom-up approach, based on a detailed knowledge of family and community dynamics.”
The Plan is not aspirational language alone. Adopted by participants on the conference’s final day, the Dakar Plan of Action on the Role of Women in the Religious Sphere states plainly that sacred books, in themselves, do not discriminate against women, in view of the link between text and context.
But rather it’s certain human interpretations that reflect an instrumentalization of religion for political or economic ends or the perpetuation of a system of patriarchal domination.
The Plan goes further, arguing that faith also carries the power to repair what it’s been used to justify.
“The ethical and spiritual foundations of religions and beliefs can help to combat polarization and conflict, while promoting reconciliation,” the Plan states.
The Plan also names what needs to change and what is the best way forward to achieve that change.
The role, legal status, funding and protection of the Mourchidates in Mauritania, the Badian Gokh in Senegal, and many women religious or community leaders, appears essential.
The Plan also sets out seven objectives, among them developing an interfaith commentary on women’s status in religious institutions, and translating the Faith for Rights toolkit into Arabic and local languages.
Its scope also reaches beyond the West Africa region, by aiming to “contribute to the Global Alliance for Human Rights, which brings together a diversity of actors called upon to mobilize, each in their own sphere of influence, to defend, protect and promote human rights.”
The Global Alliance is the coalition UN Human Rights launched in Geneva in 2026 — governments, civil society, cities, faith communities and young people, organized around a call to imagine, dialogue and act, ahead of the 80th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 2028.
Faith for Rights is now one of its activations. Dakar, in other words, isn’t a self-contained event — it’s a regional chapter feeding into a considerably larger endeavour.
Wiener said the scale of that larger picture is the point.
“More than six billion people have a religion or belief as their personal affiliation,” he said.
That is more than 80 percent of the world’s population. “It’s also why we refer to the broad concept of ‘faith-based actors’, which also includes anyone in an informal leadership position, notably women and youth. That actually is the entry point,” Wiener added.
Some participants left Dakar wary the momentum wouldn’t last.
“What frightens me is that this becomes one more meeting among many that remains just a moment, and isn’t followed by anything concrete,” Bahloul said.
Dramé said that what she hopes for from this network is that it stays alive and dynamic.
That hope has precedent. Elsewhere in the Faith for Rights framework, momentum has outlasted a closing session before. Just last June, young participants from an earlier peer-learning meeting in Bangkok facilitated working group discussions in Geneva and briefed a side event of the UN Human Rights Council directly — with ambassadors listening before they get to speak.
“Usually, you have the ambassadors reading their statements at the beginning and then listening. With their agreement, we changed the order. They first listened to the youth, and then they reacted to the recommendations from our physical hubs in Cairo, Rome, Geneva and online,” Wiener said.
Another peer-learning week for youth faith actors in Cairo last February was cost-effective thanks to co-organization by the Al Azhar Observatory for Combating Extremism, the British University in Egypt and the Dominican Institute for Oriental Studies.
“Partnerships and creativity can also make things possible,” Wiener explained.
But creativity has a ceiling. Bringing people back to the table for what comes next — the interfaith commentary the Dakar Plan of Action calls for, the translations, a standing network of young women faith actors — is a different scale of ask.
Dakar produced a plan, not just a pledge: seven commitments, written and adopted. What happens to them now is a question of funding. The network exists. The commitments exist. What’s required is the money to carry them out.
Distributed by APO Group on behalf of United Nations (UN).
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