After Windhoek+25: Can the Swakopmund Process Turn a Quarter-Century of WPS Declarations into Accountable Delivery?

This ASA Update is a detailed assessment of the 9–10 September High-Level Ministerial Seminar on Women, Peace and Security — the Swakopmund Process — convened in Cotonou. It examines the WPS normative trajectory through the 1325 twenty-fifth anniversary and the Windhoek+25 Declaration, the persistent implementation gap, and the accountability instruments that would convert momentum into delivery.

Executive Summary

On 9 and 10 September the PSC convenes in Cotonou for the High-Level Ministerial Seminar on Women, Peace and Security — the Swakopmund Process, institutionalised at the inaugural March 2024 ministerial meeting as a biennial, rotational platform for the PSC to engage local, national, regional and continental actors on WPS. This year's seminar carries exceptional momentum: it follows the Windhoek+25 Declaration, adopted in Namibia in October 2025 ahead of UN WPS Week marking the twenty-fifth anniversary of UN Security Council Resolution 1325.

The anniversary is a double-edged occasion. Twenty-five years of 1325 have produced a formidable normative edifice and a genuine shift in how peace and security are discussed — but the anniversary also measures, with uncomfortable precision, the distance between the agenda's rhetorical status and its operational delivery. Women remain under-represented in the mediation tracks, security-sector leadership and peace processes where the AU is most engaged, and the protection agenda remains under-funded. The Cotonou seminar is the natural venue to carry the Windhoek+25 momentum into accountable follow-through — or to add another declaration to twenty-five years of them.

ASA's central judgment is that WPS is the agenda on which the gap between declaration and delivery is most conspicuous and most measurable, and that the ministerial level of the Swakopmund Process is its principal asset: it raises the seminar above technical reaffirmation and creates the possibility of political commitments with names and numbers attached. The seminar's value will lie in whether it produces those, or another eloquent restatement of principles the continent has held for a quarter-century.

1. The WPS Trajectory and the 1325 Anniversary

Resolution 1325, adopted in 2000, established the WPS agenda's four pillars — participation, protection, prevention, and relief and recovery — and launched a normative cascade: subsequent Security Council resolutions, national action plans across most AU member states, continental frameworks, and dedicated institutional architecture including special envoys and focal points. The twenty-fifth anniversary in 2025, and the Windhoek+25 Declaration that marked it on African soil, represent both a celebration of that normative achievement and a stocktaking of its limits. Windhoek+25 is significant precisely because it was adopted in Africa, by African actors, framing the WPS agenda as a continental commitment rather than an externally-imposed one — which strengthens the AU's ownership and its capacity to hold itself to account.

ASA Assessment — ASA assesses the 1325 anniversary and Windhoek+25 as a genuine inflection point in ownership but not yet in delivery. The normative achievement is real and the continental framing is valuable, but twenty-five years is long enough that the agenda is now judged by outcomes rather than commitments — and the outcomes, on participation and protection, remain well short of the norms. The Cotonou seminar inherits the momentum and the accountability burden together.

2. The Implementation Gap: Participation

The participation pillar is where the gap is most measurable and most consequential. Women remain markedly under-represented in the peace processes and mediation tracks where the AU and its partners are most active — the Great Lakes, the Sudans, the Sahel, the Horn — despite substantial evidence that women's meaningful participation improves the durability of settlements. AU-led mediation panels, envoy appointments, and negotiating delegations continue to be male-dominated; women's civil-society participation is frequently confined to consultative side-events rather than the negotiating table; and women remain under-represented in the leadership of security institutions and of the AU's own peace-support operations. The Windhoek+25 momentum offers an opening to set measurable participation targets; whether the seminar seizes it is the participation-pillar test.

ASA Assessment — ASA assesses that meaningful participation — women at the negotiating table and in security leadership, not merely in consultative forums — is the pillar where accountable, measurable commitments would yield the greatest return, and where the AU's own practice is most amenable to change because it controls its own mediation appointments and mission leadership. A seminar that set and reported against concrete participation targets for AU-led processes would convert Windhoek+25 momentum into the agenda's most valuable currency.

3. The Implementation Gap: Protection and Financing

The protection pillar confronts the reality that conflict-related sexual violence and the targeting of women and girls persist across the continent's active theatres, from the eastern DRC to the Sahel to the Sudans, frequently as a deliberate tactic. The normative response is well developed; the operational and financial response is not. Protection programming — survivor services, documentation for accountability, prevention through community engagement, and the deployment of gender expertise in missions — is chronically under-funded and donor-dependent, and the WPS agenda as a whole competes poorly for resources against harder-security priorities. The financing gap is the protection gap: norms without resources do not protect.

ASA Assessment — ASA assesses the financing gap as the binding constraint on the protection pillar, and as the through-line linking WPS to the wider pattern of the September programme — an agenda strong on norms and weak on resources. A ministerial seminar is the right level at which to secure financing commitments, because financing decisions are political and require the authority ministers carry; a seminar that produced sustained, predictable WPS financing would do more for protection than any further elaboration of the protection framework.

4. The Swakopmund Process as an Accountability Instrument

The Swakopmund Process itself — biennial, ministerial, rotational, engaging actors from local to continental levels — is well-designed as an accountability mechanism if it is used as one. Its biennial rhythm creates the possibility of reporting against commitments made at the prior seminar; its ministerial level supplies the political authority to make binding commitments; and its multi-level engagement connects continental norms to national and local implementation. The question is whether the process functions as a genuine accountability loop — commitments made, progress reported, gaps addressed — or as a recurring high-level restatement. The Windhoek+25 moment is the ideal occasion to establish the former, by converting the anniversary momentum into a defined set of measurables, time-bound commitments against which the next Swakopmund seminar can report.

ASA Assessment — ASA assesses the Swakopmund Process's institutional design as sound and its accountability potential as substantially unrealised. The instrument exists to convert declaration into delivery; whether it does so depend on the discipline of setting measurable commitments and reporting against them. The 9–10 September seminar is the moment to install that discipline, using Windhoek+25 as the baseline against which future progress is judged.

5. What Would Make the Seminar Consequential

Three outcomes would convert momentum into delivery. First, measurable participation targets for women in AU-led mediation, envoy appointments, negotiating delegations and mission leadership, with a reporting mechanism against which the next Swakopmund seminar can assess progress. Second, sustained and predictable financing for the WPS protection agenda — survivor services, gender expertise in missions, and prevention programming — insulated from donor-cycle volatility. Third, the institutionalisation of the Swakopmund Process as a genuine accountability loop, with Windhoek+25 as the baseline and defined, time-bound commitments as the standard. Each is harder than a declaration, which is why each is the measure of the seminar.

ASA Final Assessment

The Women, Peace and Security seminar arrives at a moment of maximum momentum and maximum accountability pressure. Twenty-five years of 1325 and the Windhoek+25 Declaration have consolidated the normative achievement and the continental ownership of the WPS agenda; the same quarter-century has exposed, with increasing clarity, the distance between the norms and the delivery on participation and protection. ASA assesses that the Cotonou seminar's ministerial level is its decisive asset — the authority to make commitments with names and numbers attached — and that its value will be measured by whether it converts the anniversary momentum into measurable participation targets, sustained protection financing, and a functioning Swakopmund accountability loop. The risk is that the anniversary produces another declaration to add to twenty-five years of them; the opportunity is that it produces, for the first time, the accountable follow-through the agenda has always lacked. On present trajectory the outcome is uncertain, and it will be determined by whether the ministers present choose commitment over commemoration.