How shadowy Russian and US groups are pouring billions into the systematic destruction of women’s rights globally

A highly organised and well-funded campaign to strip women of their rights is gaining global momentum. “Reject harmful sex education in South Africa!” reads the headline of a petition launched in August this year.

“The South African Department of Basic Education is rolling out comprehensive sexuality education in schools, forcing explicit sexual material on children as young as nine,” it continues.

“Parents were not consulted. Families were not warned. Communities were excluded from decisions that strike at the heart of their values. Instead, government officials are using schools to advance a divisive left-leaning agenda that undermines childhood innocence and erodes parental rights.”

This petition, directed at Basic Education Minister Siviwe Garube and signed by about 13,000 people at the time of writing, is not the work of a South African organisation. It is the product of a far-right advocacy group called CitizenGo, which claims 17 million members worldwide. 

It is just one in a network of shadowy organisations with innocuous names that have sprung up over the past decade with two major aims: to strip women of their rights, and restore “conser­vative” values to politics. 

And their billions in funding come mainly from the US and Russia. 

‘Backlash’ the word of the moment

At the fourth Ministerial Conference on Feminist Foreign Policy held in Paris on 22 and 23 October, one word was on the lips of almost every speaker: backlash. Backlash against women’s rights and against progressive rights more generally.

“This is a world retreating from gender equality,” Sima Bahous, executive director of UN Women, bluntly told the conference.

Behind closed doors in the days leading up to the conference, one veteran French official after another told delegates that, for the first time in their lives, they were worried that the international consensus on human rights, which was painstakingly built in the 20th century through advocacy and global organisations like the UN, was well and truly collapsing.

“The international order is crumbling,” said a top French diplomat, speaking off the record. “We have to have our eyes wide open. We cannot look with the old glasses.”

The major feature of this backlash, the conference heard from politicians and activists from around the world, is a coordinated, well-funded campaign in support of right-wing political parties and foot soldiers – particularly online – pushing regressive, socially conservative messaging. Abortion is the front line of the narrative war, but it’s only the tip of the iceberg.

“[These forces] are behind the anti-LGBT campaigns happening across Africa,” Ugandan activist Safina Virani told delegates. “They are the ones pushing back against comprehensive sex education in schools.”

The “tradwife” (traditional wife) movement in online spaces – which sees a push towards a nostalgic, largely imaginary past in which women were happy with their position as stay-at-home wives and mothers – is a major current in this campaign. 

Another is the narrative from the “manosphere”, which encourages young men to see themselves as the victims of feminism, deprived of positions in the workplace and social status that should by rights be theirs.

Related to the anti-rights drive in some ways, but also independent in others, is the funding crisis in the global development sector. “2025 has been the worst year I’ve ever seen for funding of progressive issues. An apocalyptic year,” said Neil Datta, founder and executive director of the European Parliamentary Forum on Sexual and Reproductive Rights.

“The dismantlement of USAID is the single largest chunk that is gone, but a number of other bilateral donors have reduced development aid because of economic problems.”

The war in Ukraine, in particular, has resulted in European countries cutting development budgets in favour of defence spending. Pramila Patten, the UN secretary-general’s special representative on sexual violence in conflict, told the conference that global military spending – at $2.7-trillion – has reached an all-time high this year.

And if there is money available, it appears to be being channelled towards right-wing causes. Faye Macheke, co-executive director of the Association for Women’s Rights in Development, told Daily Maverick: “Three anti-rights organisations are currently together getting twice as much funding as 1,174 women’s organisations we surveyed put together.”

A conservative political backlash in combination with an aid funding crunch create ideal conditions for a perfect storm.

Progressive governments pull back

Diplomats at the conference spoke about how certain words in policy were now considered to be so politically unpopular among electorates that even progressive governments were pulling back from them. One is “feminism” and another is “gender”.

To understand how this is playing out in real terms, a look at the conference itself might help. The term “feminist foreign policy” was coined by former Swedish foreign minister Margot Wallström in 2014, and essentially refers to a foreign policy that puts gender equality and women’s rights at its centre.

Yet Sweden – traditionally one of the world’s feminist beacons – announced in 2022 that it would officially be revoking the policy. The Netherlands, another famously progressive nation, has since followed suit. 

Understandably, these decisions have rung alarm bells loudly in leftie circles. One expects these moves from the Trump administration in the US, but not from highly liberal northern European countries.

Are the fears from formerly progressive governments that talking about gender will alienate voters in the current climate justified? One conference speaker noted that governments that have formally adopted a feminist foreign policy, and stuck with it, have won more elections than they have lost. 

The organisers of the conference, now in its fourth year, have worked tirelessly to try to recruit more countries from around the world. This was the first year in which they were able to produce a political declaration at the conference’s end. 

This declaration notes that the signatories will stand in solidarity “at a time when international law as well as agreed norms and standards on human rights, including women’s and girls’ rights, are being challenged”.

The signatories express their “deep concern at current levels of violence and discrimination against women and girls in all their diversity, which have gone on unabatedly, ongoing attempts to roll back women’s and girls’ rights, and the persisting adverse impacts of gender inequality around the world”.

Only 31 countries have signed this declaration, and only two from Africa: Liberia and Rwanda.

There is an alternative global declaration, cited repeatedly at the conference, which offers a glimpse into the countries aligning on the other side. That is the Geneva Consensus Declaration on Promoting Women’s Health and Strengthening the Family, created in 2020. Its signatories pledged to oppose abortion and “defend the family as the fundamental unit of society”.

The Geneva Consensus now has 40 signatories, among them the US and Russia. African signatories include the Democratic Republic of Congo, Egypt, Eswatini, Cameroon, Kenya, Senegal, South Sudan, Uganda and Zambia.

Increasingly, it seems, the world is splitting in two. One side defends ideals such as human rights, international cooperation, development funding and globalist bodies like the UN.

The other side is contemptuous of multilateralism and dismisses talk of “rights” in favour of terms like “family values” – a fig leaf for a brand of social conservatism often oppressive towards women and minorities.

Forces behind the backlash

Datta is one of the people who has devoted the most time to studying the origins and current contours of the backlash.

He told Daily Maverick that although conservative activist groups have been vocal since at least the 1970s, they have undergone a “profound metamorphosis”. 

Whereas once they could only be found protesting outside abortion clinics, now they are more likely to be spotted in suits and ties in the corridors of parliaments. Their employees are young, sophisticated, both male and female, and likely to have degrees in fields such as law and politics.

“For a long time, human rights advocates were the only ones who knew how the [policy-making processes] worked,” said Datta, who attributes this former reality to the rise of equality legislation over the latter half of the 20th century. “Now the opposing side knows how the process works just as well. They know how parliaments work and they have allies inside.”

He traces the current backlash back to around 2013, when a number of countries in western Europe announced that they would pursue marriage equality – in other words, legalise gay marriage. 

In response, a number of strangely similar initiatives sprung up in eastern Europe in defence of “traditional marriage”, which seemed on the surface like grassroots conservative initiatives, but bore the hallmarks of coordinated transnational campaigns.

In Datta’s most recent research report, he shows how funding for anti-rights and anti-gender movements throughout Europe doubled in the past five years, reaching almost $1.2-billion between 2019 and 2023.

The single biggest state funder of anti-­gender movements is the Russian Federation, while the largest quantum of money comes from the US Christian right. The money is channelled through seemingly neutrally named philanthropic organisations and think-tanks, often with the word “family” in their titles.

“Covid presented an opportunity for them which they then exploited,” Datta said. 

Under lockdown, homeschooling organisations flourished. This development was used to galvanise ideas that state education was being used to indoctrinate children with left-wing propaganda. 

Fears about the unknown virus and vaccines were exploited into an anti-vaxx, anti-science movement that also took aim at globalist organisations like the UN and the World Health Organization, which were helping to coordinate health responses. 

“And we all consumed too much social media [during Covid],” said Datta.

One consensus from the conference in Paris was that the online space has almost entirely been lost to the right wing. Western misogynist influencers like Andrew Tate get the most attention, but they have their African counterparts – like Ugandan influencer Godfrey Kuteesa, who runs seemingly innocuous “boot camps” aimed at teaching young boys “discipline, honour” and “conventional manhood”.

In South Africa, a self-identified “far-right” influencer like Roman Cabanac, who was briefly appointed as head of staff by Minister of Agriculture and DA leader John Steenhuisen, has made no secret of being hosted in Russia by the Russian government prior to his government appointment, since rescinded.

That right-wing voices were excluded from mainstream media for a long time, says Datta, enabled them to “develop an alternative skillset”: one evident in the popularity of right-wing influencers and podcasters such as the late Charlie Kirk. 

“Their facility with social media gave them an advantage,” said Datta, at a time when the supremacy of mainstream media began to crumble and the media had “a certain arrogance” when it came to facing up to this new reality. 

Although his research is mainly focused on Europe, Datta has noticed the advance of this movement on the African continent.  “Africa is a hotspot, starting in the past three years,” he said.

He cautioned that the encroachment on Africa is different from the inroads made by American evangelical churches, which Daily Maverick wrote about in 2013. The intentions this time round are as much political as they are ideological – and, said Datta, people previously allowed evangelicals to take the blame without acknowledging how fertile the African soil was. 

“Now, European anti-gender groups are increasingly present in Africa.” 

Daily Maverick will be investigating the influence of these groups in future reports.

Ultimate objectives

What is the end game of this right-wing, ultra-conservative movement? Based on his research, Datta said: “Some [of these groups] want to see laws and policies which reflect church doctrine.”

In other words, for some of these groups, anti-women’s rights or anti-LGBTQIA+ positions align with their religious stances. Far-right or centre-right political parties are natural allies.

“Others have a hyper-nationalist objective using religion as a fig leaf,” said Datta, pointing out governments like Hungary’s.

Some are hyper-capitalist, which is where the US tech bros come in, believing that the state should be reduced to its minimum. In most cases, there is a convergence of oligarchic interests.

In almost all cases, the onslaught on women’s rights is a pawn in a far wider war against left-leaning governments that offer social welfare to citizens at the expense of tax breaks for their richest – largely male – citizens.

An outlandish further aim, which is nonetheless voiced increasingly explicitly by sections of the “manosphere” online, is to potentially strip women of the vote because of the belief that extending the franchise to them has resulted in the election of “soft”, left-leaning and ineffective governments.

But among the speakers at the Paris conference – both women and men – there was hope as well as determination. Said UN Women’s Bahous: “We push back against the pushback, and we go forward.”

Rebecca Davis attended the Fourth Ministerial Conference on Feminist Foreign Policy at the invitation of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Progress versus going back

Countries that signed the Ministerial Conference on Feminist Diplomacy’s political declaration: 

Armenia, Australia, Belgium, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Cyprus, Dominican Republic, Estonia, France, Germany, Iceland, Ireland, Kosovo, Latvia, Liberia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Mexico, Moldova, the Netherlands, North Macedonia, Norway, Portugal, ­Rwanda, Slovenia, Spain, Thailand, Ukraine, the UK, Uruguay.

Countries that have signed the Geneva Consensus Declaration on Promoting Women’s Health and Strengthening the Family by 2025:

Bahrain, Belarus, Benin, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Congo, Democratic Republic of Congo, Djibouti, Egypt, Eswatini, Gambia, Georgia, Guatemala, Haiti, Hungary, Indonesia, Iraq, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Kuwait, Libya, Nauru, Niger, Oman, Pakistan, Paraguay, Qatar, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, South Sudan, Sudan, Uganda, United Arab Emirates, the US, Zambia. DM

This story first appeared in our weekly DM168 newspaper, available countrywide for R35.