• States should have appointed a senior and well-respected official as focal person between the government and the African Children’s Committee; • States should have provided adequate resources to strengthen the operational capacity of the African Children’s Committee. By 2020, the African Children’s Committee – • should have continued organising inception workshops for new Committee members; • should have engaged Central African Republic, Democratic Republic of Congo, Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic, Somalia, São Tome and Principe, South Sudan and Tunisia to become State parties to the Children’s Charter, based on their signature of the African Children’s Charter and ratification of the CRC; • should have used the State reporting process to urge Botswana, Egypt, Mauritania and Sudan to withdraw their reservations under the African Children’s Charter; • should have targeted Benin, Botswana, Burundi, Cape Verde, Djibouti, Equatorial Guinea, The Gambia, Guinea-Bissau, the Seychelles, Swaziland and Zambia to submit their reports; these State parties have, by 2016, never submitted a State report to the African Children’s Committee; at the same time they have all submitted at least their initial reports to the UN CRC Committee; in the absence of a report, the African Children’s Committee should have proceeded to examine the human rights situations in these countries, based on available information, including civil society reports; • should, in collaboration with the relevant AU organs, have developed training programmes to improve the technical capacities of key State officials and members of civil society to undertake the reform of children-related laws and policies and to prepare accurate and effective State reports under the African Children’s Charter; • should have co-ordinated efforts to facilitate the sharing of good State practice on harmonising national law, policy and practice with the African Children’s Charter; • should have aligned the State reporting process under the African Children’s Charter with that under the UN CRC, highlighting the specific thematic areas contained in the African Children’s Charter; • should have streamlined the process of examining and adopting Concluding Observations in response to State reports, in anticipation of an increased number of submitted reports; • should have consistently adopted targeted, precise and measurable recommendations to States; • should have in place an effective system for the follow-up of recommendations in findings 37