Across three days of programming at the 2026 Amujae High-Level Leadership Forum, one word kept resurfacing in session after session: money. Not ambition, not qualification, not even political will — money. By the time the Forum reached its third day, that recurring thread had earned its own dedicated plenary: Resourcing Women’s Leadership, a conversation moderated by Madame Soukeyna Kane, Director of the World Bank’s Fragility, Conflict and Violence Group and former Country Director for Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, and Chad, in dialogue with two Amujae Leaders whose careers sit directly at the intersection of women, power, and finance: Ms. Peggy Serame, former Minister of Finance of Botswana, and Cllr. Charlyn Brumskine, Judge of the ECOWAS Community Court of Justice, lawyer, and former vice presidential candidate for Liberia.
The plenary didn’t emerge from nowhere. It was, in effect, the Forum answering a question its own speakers had been raising since the opening session. At the Data Panel the day before, Hon. Anta Babacar Ngom Diack had already named the problem in stark terms: money, she said, “remains the first problem” facing women who want to enter politics — the price of the logistics, the travel, and the support networks required just to become a candidate, before a single vote is ever cast.
Her fellow panelist, Suki Capobianco of the Better Politics Foundation, had put a number to that barrier. Across the continent she studies, 45% of people who choose not to run for office cite lack of money as the specific reason — not lack of ambition, not lack of qualification, but the simple absence of funds to compete.
And in her opening-day remarks, Dr. Aminata Touré, former Prime Minister of Senegal, had connected that barrier directly to the machinery of politics itself. Campaigns are costly, she noted, and women’s networks are too often too small to fund them at the scale men’s networks can. Her prescription reached beyond awareness and into policy: legal reform that would make public financing mechanisms for female politicians a requirement, not a courtesy.
By the time the Forum reached its third morning, the question was no longer whether money was a barrier. Every session that had touched the subject had already agreed that it was. The question the Resourcing Women’s Leadership plenary was convened to answer was harder: what can be done to fix it?
The choice of speakers reflects that harder question directly. Soukeyna Kane’s work at the World Bank sits inside the institutions that finance — or decline to finance — development and stability across some of the region’s most fragile states, giving her a vantage point on where resourcing decisions are actually made. Peggy Serame has sat on the other side of that table entirely, having held the national purse strings of an entire country as Botswana’s Minister of Finance. And Charlyn Brumskine brings a third lens still: a legal and judicial career, alongside firsthand experience of what it costs — financially and otherwise — to run for the second-highest office in a country, as a former vice presidential candidate.
Between the three of them, the conversation was positioned to move past naming the barrier and into the territory Anta Babacar Ngom, Suki Capobianco, and Aminata Touré had each pointed toward from different angles: financing mechanisms, institutional budgeting, and what it actually takes to make resourcing women’s leadership a structural commitment rather than a recurring complaint.
Kane made the case for looking outward, to the institutions that already move money at scale. The World Bank and bodies like it are already financing governance and stability across fragile states — so why treat women’s political participation as a separate ask, made later and always on the back foot, instead of building it into that mandate from the outset?
Serame turned the conversation inward, to the machinery every government already runs: the national budget. Her argument was one of habit as much as policy — countries budget for public goods routinely, without debating them line by line each cycle. Financing for women candidates, she suggested, deserves that same unremarkable permanence, rather than depending on the size of a woman’s personal network or the depth of her own pocket.
Brumskine went underneath both arguments, to the law that would actually have to hold them up. Disclosure requirements, contribution limits, cost ceilings — these, she argued, are what separate a real commitment from a good press release. Without legal enforcement behind it, a financing pledge survives only as long as the political will that made it, and that will has a short memory.
Three different starting points — a multilateral institution, a national treasury, a courtroom — arriving at the same destination: naming the barrier was the easy part. Building something durable enough to outlast a change in government, a change in mood, or a change in who’s willing to keep the promise, is the actual work still ahead.
Dr. Aminata Touré had already sized up that work two days earlier, and given it the force of a demand rather than a suggestion: “We do not just need political reform; we need to generalize the 50/50 equality law and take it to the African Union level, making it a requirement for all African countries.” Her position on financing followed the same logic — mandatory campaign support for women candidates, codified in law, rather than left to whatever goodwill a party happens to be feeling that election cycle.
Anta Babacar Ngom, who had opened this entire conversation at the Data Panel two days earlier, closed it from a different angle — not policy, but her own life. Long before she entered politics, she built a career as an entrepreneur and businesswoman. That order, she argued, was not incidental. Economic independence isn’t the reward waiting at the end of a political career; it’s the ground a woman needs to be standing on before she starts one. Her advice to other women was practical rather than aspirational: build that ground first. Do it early enough, and by the time the moment comes to run, the hardest question on the list is already half-answered.