Ahead of the Law: Why African Employers Should Not Wait to Address Menopause at Work

A Patchwork with a Foundation
The regulatory picture across the continent is uneven. In Nigeria, Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania, the legal system rests largely on English common law, which makes the evolving approach of the United Kingdom, well ahead on menopause at work, a useful preview of where lawmaking may head. There, menopause is not yet a protected condition in its own right, but tribunals have accepted that its symptoms can amount to a disability, and employers with 250 or more staff will be required to publish menopause action plans. Kenya’s Persons with Disabilities Act, 2025 expressly recognises psychological impairments and conditions with a substantial or long-term effect on ordinary day-to-day activities, giving employers a broader definition to work with and inviting the question of whether menopause-related conditions can fall within it. Elsewhere, the emphasis has tended to fall on the physical disability and environment: whether employees can enter and move around premises, whether recruitment is fair, or whether appraisals are equitable. Tanzania’s Persons with Disabilities Act, 2010, also focuses on physical impediments, equality in recruitment and performance assessment.

Nigeria shows both the limitation and the opportunity. Its Discrimination Against Persons with Disabilities (Prohibition) Act, 2018 looks, at first glance, like a law about physical access. Read closely, its language extends to mental and sensory impairments, and it applies to the public sector as well as the private. That raises a question no one has yet tested.

Could an employee whose hormonal condition affects how she works ground a claim, or a request for adjustments to workspace, under existing law?

The statute is not perfect and was not drafted with menopause in mind. Since it came into force in 2018, its scope has been read narrowly, with attention on the built environment and, in both sectors, poor compliance. But a narrow reading is not a fixed boundary. Nothing prevents the national industrial court from reading it more widely, and employers should not assume that the first test case will be decided narrowly.

That matters because employers’ exposure may be greater than they assume. HR teams and managers can be unaware that provisions already on the statute book could carry liability, and a single claim may be all it takes for a court to settle the point. Advocacy therefore has a legal dimension: clarifying the scope of existing protections and, in time, bringing certainty to the support women can expect.

Employers Lead, Legislators Follow
Where legislation is silent or unclear, employers have often moved first. Nigeria offers a telling precedent. Paternity leave is not provided under the Labour Act, yet it exists wherever private employers have written it into contracts and staff handbooks, and the federal civil service grants 14 working days under its revised Public Service Rules. Lagos State since 2014 introduced a 10 day paternity leave for its male civil servants. Entitlements can take shape through employer policy well ahead of statute, and change of this kind tends to start inside organisations before it reaches public policy.

In our work with employers, we see the same pattern forming around women’s health. Since 2020, there has been a marked shift in how employers approach wellbeing. Organisations have introduced access to mental health services, retained external providers whom employees can consult confidentially, and made flexibility an ordinary part of how work is discussed. Governments have become more active on mental health and on understanding the different groups within the workforce. Nairobi City County’s menstrual health leave policy, introduced in December 2025, grants county employees two paid days a month. It is not a menopause measure, but it shows that hormonal health at work is no longer unexplored territory across Africa.

Motivation is mixed. Compliance still brings many employers to the table, because no one wants to be on the wrong side of the law. But the questions being asked are changing, from what the risks are of not complying, to what could be done better and how to be more inclusive. That shift comes with a caveat particular to Africa. A large informal sector sits outside the reach of reform led by employers, and it is here that public policy must do the work.

From Intention to Implementation
The most practical insight concerns the gap between good intent and delivered change. Many organisations sincerely want to support women across their working lives, but the knowledge inside HR functions often lags. Employees move through different phases of working life, and policies need to reflect that. This includes women in their late thirties and early forties, whose perimenopausal symptoms are often ignored when menopause or hormonal health is treated purely as a question of age. Policy built around a single life stage will miss people it was meant to serve.

Closing the knowledge gap begins with training for HR managers, delivered by outside experts where necessary, and with implementation programmes that carry timelines rather than aspirations. Confidentiality has to be designed in from the start, because privacy is a genuine concern for the employees the policy is meant to help. It is also a legal requirement. Health information is sensitive personal data under both the Nigeria Data Protection Act, 2023 and Kenya’s Data Protection Act, 2019. So the way symptoms, adjustments and conversations are recorded calls for the same care as any other health record or personal data. This is important as data regulators take a strict view, and breaches can expose organisations to claims and liability.

Then there is the discipline of writing things down. Good intentions are easily deferred; a written policy is harder to ignore. When written down, there’s more responsibility and obligation to implement. The signal from senior management matters just as much. Visible acknowledgement that reasonable adjustments will be made, whether to work schedules or to how work is done, tells employees the policy is meant to be used and not merely filed.

Advocacy can begin closer to home than legislation. Large corporates often already have women’s groups, and these are natural starting points for helping human resources departments understand what employees’ needs are and what reasonable adjustments might look like in practice. Beyond the organisation, advocacy in the regulatory space can keep the issue on the legislative agenda, so that clarity eventually follows private sector trends.

The Business Case is a Retention Case
The commercial logic is straightforward. Employers that meet the physical and psychological needs of women at different stages of their careers retain skills and expertise they have spent years developing. This is not a vague concept; the cost of not doing so is measurable: around one in ten menopausal women have left a job because of their symptoms. That is especially important for C-suite succession planning. Where women are already in senior management, losing them means losing the next generation of leadership as well.

There is also a compounding effect. More women in senior management push the conversation forward because they understand what is required and can offer practical insight. An employer that supports women today builds the internal capability to support them better tomorrow and enjoy the benefits of inclusion and retention.

A Conversation Already Underway
The legal position is imperfect, uneven and, in places, untested. That is precisely why employers should not treat the absence of explicit hormonal or menopause legislation as permission to wait. Existing disability and discrimination laws may reach further than assumed. Employers have repeatedly shaped policy before legislators have caught up. The organisations that formalise policies, train their HR teams and back reasonable adjustments to work conditions and practices will be better placed for whatever the law eventually requires.

For most employers, the first step is less dramatic than it sounds: a review of absence, performance, work conditions and flexible working policies against the laws already in force, a clear and confidential route for requesting adjustments, and training for the managers who will have these conversations first. Across ALN’s member firms, it is a conversation we are increasingly having with clients, and one that is always easier to have early.

Menopause at work is not a greenfield issue, and the leadership that will define it is likely to come from employers willing to act before they are compelled to.

Beyond the Pause is a global campaign on menopause at work led by ALN, the Employment Law Alliance and Newson Health. The recording of the webinar is available at [link], and the findings of the campaign’s global survey will be published soon.