Africans see room to improve well-being of vulnerable children

Most African countries have ratified the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child and the African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child, and many have recorded advances in the protection of children’s rights and well-being in areas ranging from child survival and school enrolment to efforts to end child marriage and discrimination against girls (African Committee of Experts on. [...] This trend, though modest, Copyright ©Afrobarometer 2023 4 suggests that international condemnation of corporal punishment and an increasing emphasis on children's rights, as endorsed in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and the African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child, may be having an effect. [...] The first two columns indicate whether the country has taken two crucial steps on the path toward effective child protection: ratified the African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child and, if yes, submitted its initial report on the implementation status of the charter’s provisions to the African Committee of Experts on the Rights and Welfare of the Child (African Union, 2023). [...] More mixed results are reflected in the columns showing the proportion of respondents who say that out-of-school children are “not very frequent” or “not at all frequent,” that help for vulnerable children is available (an average of the three survey questions concerning three types of vulnerability), and that the use of physical force to discipline children is “not very frequent” or “not at all f. [...] Institute of Peace, the Mo Ibrahim Foundation, the Open Society Foundations - Africa, Luminate, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Mastercard Foundation, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, the European Union Commission, the World Bank Group, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Finland, the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in Uganda, the.