Ivory Coast Women

Organised women's football in Côte d'Ivoire traces back to a federation push in 1975, though it took over a decade for that work to produce a side capable of playing abroad. The team's first recorded international came on 1 June 1988, a 0-3 defeat to the Netherlands at the FIFA Women's Invitation Tournament — the starting point rather than any founding date.

They are known as Les Éléphantes, the women's counterpart to the men's Éléphants, and wear orange, white and green, the colours of the national flag. Home fixtures were long staged at the Stade Félix Houphouët-Boigny in Abidjan before the side moved, from 2020, to the Alassane Ouattara Stadium — also called the Stade Olympique d'Ebimpé — which holds 60,012.

Ange N'Guessan gave the team its most-remembered individual moment, scoring against Norway at the 2015 World Cup after building her club career at Barcelona and UD Tenerife. Rita Akaffou has anchored the midfield since 2005. More recently, Mariam Diakité has gone on to play in Turkey with Fenerbahçe and Bernadette Kakounan in Germany with Bayern.

On the pitch, Côte d'Ivoire has reached the Women's Africa Cup of Nations three times — 2012, 2014 and 2016 — without getting past the group stage in two of them. The exception was 2014 in Namibia, where the run ended with a 1-0 win over South Africa in the third-place match, still the best result in the team's history and the game against which every later meeting with the South Africans is measured.