What Is a Shadow Report, and Why Does It Matter So Much for American Women?

For decades, American diplomats and development practitioners supported shadow reports as tools of democratic accountability in fragile democracies worldwide. We funded women’s organizations drafting shadow reports to UN treaty bodies. We provided technical assistance on data collection and advocacy strategy. We amplified findings in diplomatic channels when governments refused to respond. We watched these reports create pressure that eventually led to legislative reforms, strengthened national action plans, and expanded protections for women and marginalized communities. We saw how shadow reports brought together diverse coalitions—women’s rights groups, legal aid organizations, disability advocates, indigenous leaders—who united around evidence governments could no longer ignore. That was the work we used to support abroad.

These weren’t abstract policy documents. They were detailed, evidence-based accounts that filled gaps where government transparency should have existed. They brought together security actors, women’s rights groups, labor advocates, and disability rights activists who had never coordinated before, uniting around shared evidence and shared demands. In Kenya, shadow reports helped update discriminatory marriage laws. In Guatemala, they forced the government to address femicide rates it had long denied. In Afghanistan, they documented women’s exclusion from peace negotiations, creating pressure that eventually led to women’s inclusion at the table.

These reports were symbols of resistance, proof that when institutions fail, citizens will find ways to make the truth heard. American diplomats, development practitioners, and democracy advocates, including those of us who once sat inside the government, have encouraged this work abroad, funded it, and helped build the very programs that made it possible. We’ve helped women’s groups based worldwide draft their own shadow reports. We’ve run independent programs to strengthen civic coalitions. We’ve supported local advocates in their demands for reform, new legislation, and in holding their governments to account. Through it all, we have seen how incremental, selfless acts of civic courage persist in the face of state-fueled fear.

Now, for the first time, two shadow reports have been published about our own government’s failures: one on the Women, Peace, and Security Act and another on the Elie Wiesel Genocide and Atrocities Prevention Act. The irony is painful. The significance is profound.

What the Shadow Reports Actually Reveal

The two U.S. shadow reports document something unprecedented: the systematic dismantling of bipartisan legal commitments to women’s equality and conflict prevention to ensure U.S. national security, codified in federal law, but now abandoned in practice.

The Women, Peace, and Security Act, passed in 2017, made the U.S. the first nation to enshrine into law what decades of global research demonstrated: that including women in peace processes, security institutions, and conflict prevention makes societies more stable, conflicts shorter, and democracies stronger. The law required regular reporting on implementation, a basic accountability mechanism that allows Congress and the public to track whether the government is doing what it promised and how U.S. taxes were being used. This year, that legally mandated report has yet to appear.

The WPS Shadow Report released in November 2025, in the absence of the legally mandated report, provides specific examples of what this means in practice. In Somalia, U.S.-funded programs that trained women mediators and supported their participation in clan-based conflict resolution have ended, leaving local women’s organizations without the resources that enabled their work. In Colombia, U.S. support for women’s participation in implementing the peace accord—which we helped negotiate—has been withdrawn. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, programs that integrated women into security sector reform and provided protection from conflict-related sexual violence have closed.

The Atrocities Prevention shadow report documents similar consequences and the abandonment of programs that supported civil society monitoring in at-risk countries. Together, these reports reveal not bureaucratic inefficiency but deliberate policy reversal—a government choosing not to comply with its own laws.

What were once functioning, whole-of-government approaches to preventing conflict, strengthening stability, and upholding equality have been quietly undone. Now, the same American officials who once reviewed shadow reports from women’s organizations in fragile democracies—offering funding, amplifying findings, pressuring governments to respond—are among those drafting shadow reports about American failures.

These shadow reports exist because the government reports do not.

The Global Consequences of Domestic Abandonment

The impact extends far beyond America’s borders. A UN Women report published earlier this year revealed that 90 percent of women’s rights and women-led organizations in humanitarian crisis and conflict zones have been forced to cut or close programs because the U.S. and other countries pulled back foreign assistance. This includes Germany, France, and the UK, to name a few, and comes at a time when the world is experiencing the most number of conflicts since World War II and military budgets are reaching unprecedented levels. These weren’t just any organizations—they were America’s most trusted partners in some of the hardest areas to operate and dangerous conflict affected contexts..

In South Sudan, the Sudd Institute’s women’s peace network, which we supported for years to mediate intercommunal conflicts, has suspended operations. In Yemen, women’s organizations that monitored ceasefires and advocated for inclusive peace negotiations—trained and funded through USAID programs—have closed their monitoring programs. In Haiti, women’s groups that provided community-based protection from gang violence and documented human rights abuses have lost their primary funding source.

These were local leaders who mediated conflicts before they required military intervention, who advanced democracy at the grassroots level, who provided relief and recovery on the front lines, who countered extremism through community engagement. Abandoning them doesn’t just create a vacuum—it sends a message that American commitments are negotiable, that our standards apply to others but not to ourselves.

Meanwhile, adversaries have noticed. China has aggressively expanded gender and development programming in Africa and Southeast Asia, positioning itself as a more reliable partner. Russia has increased funding for “traditional values” initiatives that explicitly oppose the women’s equality frameworks the U.S. once championed, and is clawing back on these commitments in international fora. The U.S. isn’t just retreating from leadership—it’s ceding the field entirely.

What Shadow Reports Have Always Meant

Shadow reports in the women’s equality movement have never been merely about documentation. They’re about power: who has it, who counts, whose truth matters. They emerge when official channels close, when governments become unresponsive, when the gap between rhetoric and reality becomes too wide to ignore.

For years, that gap defined the difference between democracies and autocracies. Democracies might fall short, but they allowed space for citizens to point out those failures. They had mechanisms for accountability. They eventually responded to pressure.

The fact that such tools are now necessary in the United States should trouble anyone who cares about democratic accountability. It means official channels have closed. It means the government is unresponsive to its legal obligations. It means the gap between America’s stated commitments and actual practice has become too wide to ignore.

The Path Forward

But shadow reports have always represented something else too: proof that accountability doesn’t die when governments abandon it. It depends on civil society. It lives in citizens who refuse to accept opacity, who document what should be documented, who speak truth to power—just as the women we supported worldwide refused to be silenced.

Congress still has authority to demand compliance with the WPS Act. Lawmakers can require the overdue reports, restore eliminated programs, and reaffirm that bipartisan commitments still mean something. The question is whether they will exercise that authority—whether America will respond to shadow reports the way we once demanded others respond, with accountability and renewed commitment, or whether we’re becoming the kind of government that simply requires them in the first place.

The women’s rights movement has always known that rights exist on paper only when someone insists they exist in practice. Shadow reports are how that insistence takes form when governments stop listening. For years, we supported women worldwide using these tools to hold their governments accountable. Now, we’re following their lead, applying the tools we once helped build to our own democracy.

The irony would be less painful if the stakes weren’t so high—for American women, for global stability, and for the future of democratic accountability itself.