Sub-Saharan Africa

This publication is intended to support everybody that works in the basic education field in South Africa. It aims to provide a common legally grounded planning, monitoring and advocacy framework that is child-centred and recognises the interconnectedness of human rights.

This issue of the INTERIGHTS Bulletin focuses on litigating the right to education in Africa. It includes the following articles:

Litigating the Right to Education: Editorial
Solomon Sacco and Susie Talbot

Africa and the Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights
Malcolm Langford and Rebecca Brown

Litigating the Right to Universal Primary Education: Challenges and Prospects
Iain Byrne

Brief about education and disability in Burundi in post-conflict recovery.

Since the beginnings of 2012, at least 70 teachers and over 100 students have been killed or wounded in northern Nigeria. Educational facilities have been burned, thousands of children forced out of schools and teachers made to flee for safety. The purpose of this briefing is to draw attention to the damaging effects of this on-going violence. It calls on the Islamist armed group Boko Haram and other gunmen to immediately cease all attacks on schools; and on the Nigerian authorities to provide better protection for schools and ensure that attacks are properly investigated.

The  report examines Senegal’s mixed record in addressing the problem in the year since a fire ripped through a Quranic boarding school in Dakar housed in a makeshift shack, killing eight boys. After the fire, President Macky Sall pledged to take immediate action to close schools where boys live in unsafe conditions or are exploited by teachers, who force them to beg and inflict severe punishment when the boys fail to return a set quota of money. While important legislation has advanced, authorities have taken little concrete action to end this abuse.

The government of Malawi should increase efforts to end widespread child and forced marriage, or risk worsening poverty, illiteracy, and preventable maternal deaths in the country.
According to government statistics, half of the girls in Malawi will be married by their 18th birthday, with some as young as age 9 or 10 being forced to marry. Malawi faces many economic challenges, but the rights of girls and women, including the right to education, should not be sacrificed as a result.

This practical toolkit on the right to education was published by Amnesty International in collaboration with the Right to Education Initiative.  It is part of the Haki Zetu handbook series on economic, social and cultural rights, developed by the Special Programme on Africa of Amnesty International Netherlands.

This Guide is intended to be a comprehensive resource for finding out more about the Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child and the African Committee of Experts on the Rights and Welfare of the Child. It provides practical information for organisations wishing to engage with the Committee but also relevant background information to ensure that this engagement is put into context.

This article explores the increasing privatisation of education. It examines various criticisms of the private provision of education and claims that privatisation is driven by an ideological agenda which is generally uncaring about any notion of the “public good” purposes of education — that is, of its role in producing social cohesion through the provision of education that is of high quality for all members of society.