the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, which is only mandated to examine State reports, submitted under the CRC. The African Children’s Committee held its first meeting in 2002. Initially severely under-resourced and largely unknown, the Committee made a slow start. The initial years of the Committee were without a fully functional Secretariat, until its first substantive Secretary was appointed in 2007. Since then, the African Children’s Committee has worked hard within the OAU/AU structures to assert its legal authority as the continent’s leading children’s rights body. All African UN member States have ratified the CRC and 47 of them are party to the African Children’s Charter. Of these 47 States, 11 (Benin, Botswana, Burundi, Cape Verde, Djibouti, Equatorial Guinea, The Gambia, Guinea-Bissau, the Seychelles, Swaziland and Zambia) have never submitted a State report to the African Children’s Committee. By contrast, all of these States have submitted at least their initial reports to the UN CRC Committee. This data set strongly suggests a predilection for the UN system. In addition to the African Children’s Charter (and the CRC), a number of other AU and other international treaties are of great relevance to children, and serve to complement the African Children’s Charter. The most obvious is the ‘mother treaty’, the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights (African Charter), which provides extensively for the rights of ‘every individual’, including children. The African Youth Charter, which entered into force in 2009, is also of particular significance. Agenda 2063 (paragraph 54) stipulates that the ‘youth of Africa shall be socially, economically and politically empowered through the full implementation of the African Youth Charter’. ‘Youth’ is defined as persons between the ages of 15 and 35 years. The youngest of the ‘youth’ and the oldest of the ‘children’ (those between 15 and 18 years of age) are, therefore, clearly covered by both treaties. Speaking to the needs of ‘youths’ on the continent, the Youth Charter addresses issues such as skills development and youth employment, which are not touched upon in the African Children’s Charter. As far as it is relevant 4