Fellow Africans,

As in previous years, this November 25, we celebrate the International Day dedicated to the fight against all forms of gender-based violence, that is to say violence of which women and girls - who are also our mothers, our wives, our sisters and our children-  are regularly subjected to.

In accordance with a well-established tradition, this commemoration will continue through a global awareness-raising campaign. It will last until December 10, 2021, another symbolic date dedicated to the celebration of human rights.

These 16 days of intense activism will take place under the following global theme: "Make the world Orange: End violence against women now". The African Union, because of its particular position in this struggle, has taken up this theme under a more operative and specific formulation towards men: "Make Africa Orange: African male leaders explore approaches of positive masculinity to end the scourge of violence against women and girls in Africa".

This reformulation is to the credit of H.E. Felix Antoine TSHISEKEDI TSHILOMBO, President of the Democratic Republic of Congo and current Chairperson of the African Union, who took the right decision to open the awareness campaign by organizing a conference scheduled precisely on November 25, 2021 in Kinshasa on the theme referred to above.

Organized in close collaboration with some of his peers in their functions within the Union, it is open to Heads of State and Government of the Union, senior figures in the political, economic and academic world and opinion leaders.

This conference responds to a question that the President of the Union has agreed to confer the status of a challenge that needs to be faced. Despite the multidirectional efforts deployed in favor of the fight against gender-based violence, this phenomenon unfortunately continues unabated. Worse, it has been reinforced and amplified in the particular context marked by the occurrence of the covid-19 pandemic, the physical corollary of which has been lockdowns.

The inventory of violence against women, in all its awful forms, during the periods of lockdowns linked to the pandemic, as confirmed by the available data, reveals an ascending curve over time. This indicates the emergence of a male profile structured by the anti-values of aggressiveness and violence, defying the minimal ethical rule imposing to all the recognition of the dignity of every human being.

The rise in intensity of violence against women in this context of confinement has been grafted onto older practices, no less characterized by the same blameworthy condescension towards women and girls, by virtue of cultural patterns that have been permanently inscribed in the male collective unconscious.

The prevalence of behavioral norms established on the basis of a way of life, whose configuration and organization are strongly influenced by the primacy of patriarchy, has had the effect of trivializing and banalizing gender-based violence and even inscribing it as a kind of social "normality".

The conference convened by the Chairperson of the African Union aims, through a participatory reflection involving male leaders, to create the objective conditions for a deconstruction of the anthropological basis of all these backward beliefs and practices that constitute a formidable obstacle to the emancipation of women and girls. It is also a pledge to the inclusive building of the Africa we want.

This reflection will transcend its theoretical sphere to be transcribed in concrete actions ordered in the coherence of an action plan supported by a roadmap of  the efforts to be made.

In the logic of these efforts each man and each boy should consider himself as an important ally in the fight against violence against women and girls by adopting an ethical behavior centered on the conviction that the man-woman relationship is complementary in the differentiation of its constitutive elements.

This mutual complementarity, which is the expression of this new paradigm that has been aptly labelled "positive masculinity", is the driving force that will propel Africa into the triple sphere of development, peace and individual and collective well-being.