A new Afrobarometer report spanning 38 African countries finds that women continue to lag significantly behind men in education, employment, and asset ownership, with rural women facing the steepest disadvantages. Just 54% of women have secondary or post-secondary education compared to 62% of men, while only 25% of working-age women hold paid employment against 39% of men — a gap that widens to as much as 34 percentage points between urban and rural women in countries like Eswatini (a small landlocked kingdom in southern Africa). The findings are significant because despite women's empowerment being a cornerstone of both the African Union's Agenda 2063 and the UN's Sustainable Development Goals, the Africa Gender Index shows African women still access roughly half the social, economic, and political opportunities available to men, with no African country — except Mauritius — earning better than a "poor" rating on gender equality.