Women bring distinctive interests and values to forest management. However, there is no clear understanding of how women are engaged in forest management practices in Africa. This study sought to examine different engagement models describing women's engagement in forest management, their effectiveness toward enhancing women's contributions, and how they can be enhanced or advanced to integrate women's valuable knowledge and decisions toward SFM inclusively across Africa. It discussed various bottlenecks hindering women from effective sustainable engagement, including division of labor, gender inequality in forestlands ownership, social norms and values related to power access, rules of entry and practice, inequality in decision making, as well gendered perception on forestry management and benefits sharing.

Different pathways are suggested to promote women engagement in sustainable forestry management. Such pathways include women empowerment and capacity building to boost their confidence in forestry decision making processes, deliberate inclusion of women in forest management committees that are involved in decision making process from design to implementation, giving women direct access, ownership and control of forestlands, and enhanced democracy in social institutions and groups to allow more effective women involvement in the management process. Improving the communication and information structures in different engagement models was also considered an effective way to allow women participation in decision making process.

It is, however, noted that these pathways need to be contextualized to match the community context due to social and institutional diversity across Africa. A one-fits-all approach can yield varying levels of successes and failures in different ecological and sociocultural contexts. This review suggested more context-specific studies and reports to establish the dynamics of women engagement in different areas. It also noted that the study was limited to the published documents, some of which were dropped due to subscription to access the full documents, which might have affected their randomization. It is essential to go beyond the published articles to also interrogate specific community forests reports and management plans to understand their dynamics in women engagement. The study is an important starting point in such engagement and provides general pathways that can be tweaked to enhance women participation in sustainable forest management.