Groundbreaking research on safe abortion access in West and Central Africa demanded more than a report. It demanded a campaign built to make the invisible impossible to ignore.
A legal right that cannot be reached is not a right, it is a promise broken at the point of need. Across Benin, Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, Togo, and Cameroon, safe abortion is permitted by law. Yet stigma, bureaucratic obstruction, inaccessible services, and profound information gaps ensure that millions of women and girls never reach the care they are legally entitled to. The distance between what the law allows and what women can actually access is not an accident. It is the product of gender inequality, systemic neglect, and patriarchal social norms that fill every space the law leaves unguarded.
Rutgers International, a global leader in sexual and reproductive health and rights, commissioned the first systematic comparative study in the region examining how legal frameworks, administrative systems, and social norms interact to shape — and obstruct — victim-survivors’ access to safe abortion. Conducted across five countries with young, in-country researchers whose contextual knowledge kept the voices of those most affected at the centre of the evidence, the research produced findings too urgent to remain inside a report.
We partnered with Rutgers to transform that research into The Maze Women Face: Stuck Between Rights and Reality — a bold campaign anchored in a single, precise metaphor. The maze is not decorative. It is structural: a visual and narrative system that maps the overlapping obstacles women encounter — legal, bureaucratic, social, medical — without reducing their experience to abstraction. The creative approach holds two things in tension simultaneously: the systemic nature of the violations and the individual dignity of every woman navigating them.
Every year, around 25 million unsafe abortions occur worldwide, according to the WHO — over 20,000 of them fatal. In West Africa alone, an estimated 2.3 million unsafe abortions were performed in a single year; in Central Africa, 1.1 million more. These are not statistics about risk. They are statistics about preventable death — deaths that research consistently links to gender inequality, stigma, and the failures of systems that were supposed to protect women’s rights in the first place.
The campaign translated that evidence into a visual identity and messaging system designed to engage audiences across the full advocacy spectrum — from policymakers and health system actors to communities and civil society organisations. Clear data storytelling, survivor-centred messaging, and a flexible visual language built for diverse contexts came together as a cohesive call for a future where every woman’s path through that maze leads not to another wall, but to trust, dignity, and safe care. Because the maze is not inevitable. It was built. And what was built can be dismantled.
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