According to the Global Gender Gap Report 2026 published on Wednesday by the World Economic Forum (WEF), which benchmarks 145 economies across four dimensions–economic participation and opportunity, educational attainment, health and survival, and political empowerment–the world is closer to parity than ever, but progress is fragile, with gains reversing in some areas. Nearly every economy tracked since 2006 has advanced gender parity, yet full parity is 120 years away.
Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) ranks sixth at 68.8%, up 1.6 percentage points from last year, and shows the widest variation of any region. Its strongest long-term gain is parity among legislators, senior officials and managers, up 28.7 percentage points since 2006. Namibia (84.5%) climbed four places to fourth, the highest-ranked country in SSA.
“Namibia has maintained full parity in secondary and tertiary enrolment in almost every edition since 2006,” says Silja Ballera, a PhD economist and Head of Mission, Economic Inclusion at the Centre for the New Economy and Society at WEF, to FORBES AFRICA, in relation to the Educational Attainment subindex, one of the report’s four core pillars.
The 20th edition of the report shows women now reach senior leadership in business and government at levels rare in 2006 yet remain largely underrepresented in roles that carry the greatest economic and political influence. Globally, the gender gap now stands at 69.2% closed, where 100% represents full parity, up 0.4 percentage points over the past year. The report also indicated that women are less represented in artificial intelligence (AI) firms than in comparable non-AI firms at every level. According to WEF, within AI occupations, women are concentrated in data annotation roles, which are often lower-paid AI positions, while making up just 19.3% of AI engineers. “Progress towards gender parity in leadership has stalled for a fourth year. Based on the current trajectory, girls born today will not see equal representation at the top in their lifetime. And the issue is even more pronounced for women working in AI roles,” Sue Duke, Managing Director for EMEA & LATAM and Head of Global Public Policy & Economic Graph at LinkedIn, said in the report. Four economies have appeared in every top 10 since 2006: Iceland, Finland, Norway and Sweden.
“Improvements on other individual dimensions have been significant since 2006, with women in Namibia not only increasing their representation in the labor force but also in senior leadership: labor-force participation parity increased by 14.1 percentage points, from 74.3% in 2006 to 88.4% in 2026,” Ballera adds, saying that parity among legislators, senior officials and managers rose by 34.3%, from 42.9% to 77.2%. “Starting with a strong baseline, Namibia has also maintained full parity among professional and technical workers throughout the history of the index.”
