June 16th: Day of the African child

16th of June Day of the African child

At the Gcap Africa meeting in Nairobi, we have chosen the 16th of June day of the African Child as a day of action against poverty. The day of the African child was identified by the African Union in remembrance of the massacre of innocent children in South Africa in 1976 by the Apartheid regime. Each year a theme is chosen to mark the day and this year’s theme is: African Orphans are collective responsibility. Between 50% and 60 % of 850 million African are children and youth, and n the day of the African Child many civil society organisations member or not of Gcap will hold activities ranging from direct services to children to advocacy work and media events to put under the spot light issues affecting African children. We would like to take on the opportunity to link up theses activities with the Global Call to Action Against Poverty and to support the national campaigns on the Millennium Development Goals. We have worked as a team “Day of the African child group” on a menu of activities to propose to the national coalitions to enrich or to modify what they have already planned.

We plan at the continental level to
• Gather information on all activities done on the 16th of June by the National Coalitions and have them posted on the web page in the GCAP and Millennium Campaign websites and relayed radios and TVs on the continents.
• Develop a continental media release
• Invite a high placed person to speak on the day at a media event in Soweto e.g. the Nobel peace prize winner, Prof Wangari Mathai was proposed.
We are proposing to the National coalitions and involve in the Millennium Campaign and the Global Call to action against poverty a menu of activities.
• Distribution of white band and yellow band to orphan, school children, to street children.
• Having children design messages to tell the world to pass on local medias and to design posters from.
• Lobby to the Members of Parliaments and have them wear the white band.
• Get celebrities to issue a statements on that day
• Tie white bands around national monuments, parliaments, Law houses, children courts, and UN agencies.
• Draft appropriate laws and policies to be enacted to protect the African children and
• Identify women and a children to speak out for all the children and women in Africa. TV documentaries, Bill boards, the websites, and if possible speak out in one major National forum.
• Draft main national message
• Organize music concert, poems sharing and dramas crying Out to the world about their problems.
• Organize Street Caravans and dances in front of Parliament and Embassies to get attention from the policy makers will be encouraged.
• Policy Analysis Forums to be organized. These will facilitate a Children and Youth Position paper that will be presented in the G8 Embassies, WTO forum, UN Summit hearings.
• Mobilize participants for the G8, UN summit and WTO meetings
• Writing of shadow reports of MDGs progress
The messages should be developed around identified themes of the Global Call to Action Against Poverty and on the Millennium Development Goals.
The themes should be looked into in as far as they affect or hinder human rights especially access to education, health services, food and shelter for children and youth.

Send my Friend to the G8 events: Concept note

Summary
As world leaders prepare to meet at the Gleneagles G8 Summit in July, the Global Campaign for Education (GCE) and the African Networks Campaign on Education for All (ANCEFA) are planning a set of linked events in both African and G8 countries on 16 June – the Day of the African Child. The aim is to build popular momentum behind the demand for free, good quality education for every child and to put pressure on G8 leaders to increase aid and cancel debt in order to achieve this.

About GCE and ANCEFA
The GCE, established in 1999, brings together teachers’ unions, Southern civil society groups and major international NGOs such as Oxfam, ActionAid, Save the Children, Plan, World Vision and CARE in a coalition campaigning for the right to education. It is active in more than 100 countries and constitutes one of the single largest and most dynamic global mobilisations around any of the Millennium Development Goals. ANCEFA, a core member of GCE, is a regional network of civil society coalitions on education in more than 30 African countries.

The GCE’s ‘Send My Friend To School’ campaign
This April, as part of the Global Call to Action Against Poverty (GCAP), GCE successfully engaged schools across the world in making cut-out representations of the more than 100 million children who are not in school. On these ‘friends’, children have written personal messages to politicians demanding that they act now to ‘Send My Friend to School’. ‘Friend’ events in more than 100 countries during the last week of April involved X heads of state and Y MPs. The UK’s Make Poverty History campaign is planning a handover of one million ‘friends’ to Tony Blair and other G8 leaders at Gleneagles.

Aims of the G8 Send-Off Events
On 16th June, youth activists, celebrities and senior politicians in several different countries will launch the ‘friends’ on their final journey to Gleneagles. These events are planned to coincide with the Africa-wide day of action being organised on 16 June by the Global Call to Action Against Poverty (GCAP).
The G8 send-off events will:
• build popular momentum behind the call for increased aid and debt cancellation to finance free, quality education
• attract significant international and national media attention through creative visual imagery (e.g. school buses or matatu taxis stuffed full of cut-out ‘friends’) and the involvement of celebrities, heads of state, and other high-profile figures
• provide a platform for popularising the Millennium Development Goals and raising awareness of the Africa Commission and Millennium Project practical recommendations for achieving the MDGs
• mobilise the emotional and moral force of children’s voices in order to increase pressure on G8 leaders (and national governments) to deliver

Target countries for the G8 Send-Off events
GCE is providing funding for events in the UK, France, the US and Germany, together with Tanzania, Ethiopia, Senegal and South Africa - as well as India and Brazil as they are invited observers to the G8 Summit. We hope that other GCE national chapters will also organize send-off events using their own resources.

Participating leaders and celebrities
So far, Gordon Brown, Laura Bush (in her role as UNESCO literacy ambassador), Jeffrey Sachs and Graca Machel have indicated strong interest in participating in the June 16 events. Involvement of other celebrities/leaders is under discussion with the Africa Commission, UNICEF and GCE partners in the launch countries such as Comic Relief, Richard Curtis and US NGOs. National GCE chapters are inviting heads of state directly.

Format of launch events
Slightly different formats are planned in each country. In the UK, the event centres on the opening of an exhibition of ‘friends’ by a famous artist and in the US, a Capitol Hill event is planned. However all events will include a symbolic ‘photo opportunity’ send-off for the ‘friends’, the use of white bands (symbol of GCAP) and a press conference or panel discussion giving both children and leaders the opportunity to voice their views on what must be done now to achieve the education MDGs and make the right to free quality education a reality.

For more information, please contact Lucia Fry on: email: [email protected], tel: ++ 44 207 5617561

Press statement

‘African orphans our collective responsibility’

Youth and children call for debt cancellation, trade justice, increase in quality aid and better governance to respond to the increasing number of orphans

The Day of the African Child White Band Day is a part of The Global Call to Action against Poverty, an alliance of over sixty national coalitions made up of civil society organisations including trade unions, faith based organisations, women and youth associations among others across the world. The aim of the white band day is to create widespread mobilisation of youth and children to demand action and accountability from leaders in their commitments to eliminate poverty and improve human dignity and well-being.

This year's day of the African Child theme is ‘African orphans our collective responsibility.’ At the continental level governments will be lobbied to put in place statutory, developmental and governance interventions to address the plight of children and youth. The theme is also a call to the global community to poverty eradication through debt cancellation, trade justice, increased quality aid and better governance to respond to the increasing number of orphans in the continent. Answering this call is key to opening up space for children and youth to enjoy their basic human rights.

Efforts to tackle poverty and deliver sustainable development, as pledged in the Millennium Declaration, have been grossly inadequate. Governments too often fail to address the needs of their citizens, aid from rich countries is inadequate in both quality and quantity, and promises of debt cancellation have not materialized. Rich countries have yet to act on their repeated pledges to tackle unfair trade rules and practices. In Kenya for example, about 32% of the national budget is being used to service debt. This amount is greater than the amount spent on health and education together. Behind these cold statistics of failed promises are lives of real people- youth and children, where most are affected by HIV.

Today, 1 billion children and youth are trapped in abject poverty with 104 million unable to access basic education. Every day more than 800million people (most of them children) go to bed on an empty stomach. HIV/AIDS kills more than 2 million people every year and adds to the league of millions of orphans. 1.4 million people don’t have access to safe water. Hunger is a daily norm other than an exception for many with six million children dying of malnutrition before their fifth birthday every year. In those parts of the world the death of mothers in childbirth and children in infancy is still routine - deaths that could be prevented by the availability of simple healthcare.

Poverty is a violation of the Convention on the Rights of the Child on a massive scale; it is compounded by the trade injustice that keeps people poor. The Convention on the Rights of the Child like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other national and international statutes protects the rights of all people to an adequate standard of living and well-being, including education, food, clothing, housing, and medical care: rights whose achievement are undermined by inadequate commitment and policies that do not favor the implementation of globally-agreed upon declarations and statutes.

The Global call to action Against Poverty (GCAP) is a global coalition of organisations ranging from grassroots through national and international levels. The campaign objectives include trade justice, debt relief, increased and improved aid and ensuring leaders live up to their promises and commitments on MDGs.

The campaign aims to use the occasions of the G8 Summit, the UN Millennium Assembly and the WTO meeting in Hong Kong- these 3 have been designated the White Band Days when the campaign will be signified by the wearing of a white band.
However as Africa bears the uneven brunt of Global Poverty we as a people are alive to our responsibilities. It is therefore pertinent for Africa to have an additional and African specific White Band Day. In recognition of the serious impact of poverty on children, this African White Band day, which will kick off the campaign in Africa, has been fixed for the Day of the African child.
This day set aside by African heads of states to remember the 1976 massacre of innocent children by the apartheid regime in South Africa is highly significant in the light of the present campaign. Thousands of black school children took to the streets in a march more than half a mile long, to protest the inferior quality of their education and to demand their right to be taught in their own language. Hundreds of young boys and girls were shot down; and in the two weeks of protest that followed, more than a hundred people were killed and more than a thousand were injured.

To honour the memory of those killed and the courage of all those who marched, the Day of the African Child has been celebrated on 16 June every year since 1991, when it was first initiated by the Organization of African Unity. The Day also draws attention to the lives of African children today.

This is why the African chapter of GCAP has decided to link the two activities and it is in this connection that we hope you will accept to hold a news conference or be the principal host of any of these other proposals that is to your liking.