In July 2025, more than a hundred stakeholders – representing politics, public administration, government, civil society, and international organisations – convened at Cameroon’s Parliament and unanimously endorsed a draft bill on the “Protection of Women and Girls Against Gender-Based Violence.” Although it remains uncertain whether (and when) the draft, currently under review at the Ministry of Justice, will ultimately be enacted, the event marked a significant milestone in a lobbying process that had begun several months earlier.

In retrospect, few factors sustained the momentum of these advocacy efforts as strongly as what stakeholders have come to describe as “rising cases of femicide.” While my research traces one of the earliest uses of the term in the Cameroonian context only to July 2020, ‘femicide’ has – by our internal count at ACCSS Africa – become second only to “gender-based violence” (a term with a much longer history) in the vocabulary of officials, activists, and social media commentators addressing violence against women over the past three to four years.

Yet, strikingly, the draft bill adopted by these stakeholders makes no reference to ‘femicide’. This raises an obvious and important question: why lobby authorities on the grounds that stronger legal measures are needed to curb “rising cases of femicide” and gender-based violence, only to submit a draft that remains silent on so-called femicides? To what extent does this omission reflect technical legal considerations, and to what extent does it stem from political calculations aimed at avoiding friction with authorities? More fundamentally, is ‘femicide’ a distinct and measurable problem in Cameroon in the first place? And how, if at all, might the creation of a specific criminal offence of ‘femicide’ contribute to addressing it?

If these questions interest you – and if you would like to explore the broader conceptual, political, and legal debates surrounding femicide in Cameroon – I invite you to subscribe to the newsletter of the African Centre for Crime and Security Studies (ACCSS Africa).

Starting Tuesday, 14 April 2026, my team and I will publish a five-part weekly series examining different dimensions of femi(ni)cide in Cameroon:

• 12 May 2026: Femicide here, feminicide there: conceptual ambiguity and the challenge of harnessing a transformative concept

• 19 May 2026: Debunking the myths: are femi(ni)cides truly on the rise, or is this an optical effect driven by the velocity of information on social media?

• 26 May 2026: The politics of femi(ni)cide: preserving the progressive potential of a concept in a politically constrained environment

• 02 June 2026: How to criminalize femicide effectively? Early lessons from the African Union Convention on Ending Violence Against Women and Girls

• 9 June 2026: Beyond the law: essential complementary responses that must not be overlooked

This series on femi(ni)cide in Cameroon is directed by Dr. Dany Tiwa. A sociologist and critical criminologist, Dr. Tiwa is a graduate of the Universities of Yaoundé I (Cameroon), Lille 3 (France), Hamburg (Germany), and Utrecht (Netherlands). He currently works as a senior research and evaluation consultant for several UN agencies and is the founder and Executive Director of the African Centre for Crime and Security Studies (ACCSS Africa), the only independent Think Tank is central Africa focusing of crime and security.