Cameroon: 50 femicides in four months, a draft bill expected at the November session

Cameroonian associations fighting against femicide presented the progress of a draft bill on gender-based violence on November 2, 2026, in Yaoundé, which they want included on the agenda of the November parliamentary session, according to allAfrica's press review citing RFI.

The text, drafted at the beginning of 2026 according to RFI, aims to be more punitive than the provisions currently in force. For Yvonne Akoa, president of the Association of Women Lawyers of Cameroon, this is above all not a "cosmetic law" like those adopted so far: the text "defines gender-based violence", incriminates and punishes it, and introduces "a protection order that does not yet exist", as well as a section dedicated to reparations.

What the figures say

A document published on October 6, 2026, by the League for the Education of Women and Children (LEFE), a Cameroonian NGO founded by Pauline Biyong, cites data presented by the Ministry for the Promotion of Women and the Family before the National Assembly on June 19, 2026: 50 femicides and 1,599 cases of gender-based violence, including 166 rapes, between January and April 2026. The same organization points out that the 2018 Demographic and Health Survey showed that 44% of women who had lived in a union reported having already experienced violence by a partner.

Also according to LEFE, out of 54 African countries, 38 have a specific law against violence against women and 24 have a family code; Cameroon reportedly has neither. The organization does not specify the source of this comparison.

A 64-article draft bill

The draft bill contains 64 articles, LEFE indicates, and reportedly stems from consultations held in Kribi in 2023, Mbankomo in 2024, and Ebolowa in 2026. It would cover economic, digital, and obstetric violence as well as coercive control, and would provide for a protection order in less than twenty-four hours, a single departmental point of contact, and free forensic medical evidence.

The NGO set a deadline of November 6, 2026, the first anniversary of the seven-year presidential term, and is concurrently demanding a persons and family code that has been awaited for years. "Women and children can no longer wait," it writes.

The sources consulted do not provide the exact dates for the November 2026 parliamentary session. Between a media count of eight women killed in eight days in August 2026, cited by the NGO without naming a source, and a text waiting to pass through the doors of the Assembly, it is the speed of the law, rather than its existence, that Cameroonian women lawyers are calling into question.