Women’s rights organizations maintained their advocacy for genuine inclusion in Haiti’s governance structures throughout 2025, arguing that despite formal commitments to women’s representation in the transitional arrangement, real power continued to be exercised primarily by male political actors while women were given symbolic roles without decision-making authority. The NGO Working Group on Women, Peace and Security stressed in a March 2025 update that violations of women’s and girls’ rights continued “with impunity.”
The update identified the scarcity of access to healthcare including sexual and reproductive care, the lack of funding for the humanitarian response, and barriers to women’s political participation as the key issues requiring urgent action. Women advocates noted that the same political culture of masculine competition that had produced Haiti’s governance crisis was being reproduced in the transitional arrangement, with women’s inclusion treated as a box to check rather than a genuine transformation of who held power.
At the community level, women’s organizations continued to provide the social services, mutual aid, and community leadership that the formal state had failed to deliver. Women community leaders in displacement sites, in gang-affected neighborhoods, and in rural communities under pressure were maintaining social fabric through roles that the formal governance system did not recognize or resource.
Advocates called for the electoral process being planned for 2026 to incorporate specific measures to increase women’s representation in elected bodies, including quotas or reserved seats that would ensure women’s legislative presence reflected their proportion of the population. They argued that elections that reproduced the historical pattern of overwhelmingly male political leadership would not represent the governance transformation Haiti needed, regardless of the procedural validity of the process.