Review of Progress in the Advancement of Child Rights in Africa: Reflecting on the past and future challenges and opportunities

As the thirtieth anniversary of the adoption of the ACRWC approaches, UNICEF would like to contribute to knowledge about the advancement of children’s rights in the context of the ACRWC, reflecting on the past and shedding light on the opportunities that the ACRWC and the CRC hold for the future. This document follows a review undertaken CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION 3 in the second half of 2019 and shared for validation purposes during the Fifteenth Civil Society Organizations’ Forum on the African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child held in Egypt in November 2019.

There were four main objectives for this review, namely to:
• Reflect on progress in the advancement of child rights in Africa for the last 30 years;
• Determine the roles of different actors in this progress, particularly in strategic positioning for child rights over time;
• Examine country level accountability mechanisms in response to the ACRWC work; and,
• Reflect on the future challenges that the African continent will face and the ways in which the ACRWC, in this context, can best position itself, including for Africa’s Agenda for Children 2040, the 2030 Agenda and the CRC.