Assessing gender provisions within the Africa-EU trade relationship

The EU-ACP agreement has mainstreamed gender over time. The third Lomé convention, signed in 1984, provided the agreement’s first reference to women’s rights. Over successive iterations of the agreement the provisions on gender equality and women’s rights have become increasingly prominent in the relationship. In both the Cotonou Agreement (2000-2023) and the recently concluded Samoa Agreement place significant emphasis on gender mainstreaming and have gender as a cross-cutting theme. The Africa Regional Protocol in the Samoa Agreement similarly reflects that approach, containing specific protocols of Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women (e,g. Articles 40 and 66). This in turn is fully in line with the gender policies enacted through the African Union and the African Continental Free Trade Area. Recent scholarship on the Feminist Political Economy of Trade (Hannah et al 2020, 2022) however have argued that the ‘gendering’ of trade agreements such as that between Africa and the EU both reflects an emergent global trade policy norm and raises questions about whether this represents a truly transformational turn in global trade politics (Hannah et al 2020, 2022). Similar concerns have been raised by researchers such as Debusscher (2013) who argued that the dominant approach to gender equality within Africa-EU relations has been instrumental rather than transformational. This paper will explore these themes, via an indepth exploration of gender mainstreaming in the latest phase of Africa-EU trade agreements. In doing so it not only contributes to contemporary understandings of gender mainstreaming in trade and the dominant ideological drivers in Africa-EU relations, but more widely throws light onto debates about the transformationalist potential of SDG and Agenda 2030 framework.