• • • • • • • • • • • Aspiration 1: The African Children’s Charter, as supervised by the African Children’s Committee, provides an effective continental framework for advancing children’s rights. 
 Aspiration 2: An effective child-friendly national legislative, policy and institutional framework is in place in all member States. 
 Aspiration 3: Every child’s birth and other vital statistics are registered. 
 Aspiration 4: Every child survives and has a healthy childhood. 
 Aspiration 5: Every child grows up well-nourished and with access to the 
basic necessities of life. 
 Aspiration 6: Every child benefits fully from quality education. 
 Aspiration 7: Every child is protected against violence, exploitation, neglect 
and abuse. 
 Aspiration 8: Children benefit from a child-sensitive criminal justice system. 
 Aspiration 9: Every child is free from the impact of armed conflicts and other 
 disasters or emergency situations. Aspiration 10: African children’s views matter. Agenda 2040 presents the monitoring framework for monitoring these aspirations which requires that every 5 years, progress towards achieving these aspirations are reported on through existing reporting mechanisms of member states. From 2020, the ACERWC will bring together stakeholders to report on the progress but before that, in 2019, the ACERWC will be producing a baseline study on the status of child rights on the continent in line with the 10 aspirations. The baseline will be used as comparison point going forward when member states report to see how things are changing. There will be a child rights summit taking place every year with Ministers where we will discuss implementation of the Agenda. The presenter requested that people present today should take this agenda as their own and implement it. To start with, we need to push for South Sudan to ratify the ACC as they are the only country in the EAC that is yet to do so. A question to reflect on is about the importance of submitting reports to the ACERWC. For example, within EAC, only Rwanda has submitted the three reports, so why are the other countries not also keeping up with this? We need to also push for child specific legislation within the region and work towards putting in place strong, independent institutional frameworks that can ensure the effective implementation of child laws. 3.4. Plenary Discussion: During the consideration of the presentation and plenary discussion, the following were highlighted: a. A participant shared that if you look at the registration of births bill in South Sudan it was tabled a while ago and still has not been passed which indicates that there are competing priorities. This could also explain why the Republic of South Sudan has ratified the UNCRC but not the ACRWC? It was noted that there are unique issues in the ACRWC such as use of child soldiers and death penalty that the UNCRC does not address so it is important to push for this ratification in South