Save the Children International (SCI) has called on the governments in Nigeria to ensure full implementation of the Child Rights Act (CRA) in the country.
Nigeria adopted the CRA in 2003 in line with the United Nations (UN) Convention on the Rights of the Child and the African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child.
However, not all the states in Africa’s most populous nation have domesticated the law.
Child marriage, for instance, is a common practice in Nigeria rooted in traditional, economic, religious, and legal conditions that disproportionately affect girls and women.
According to the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), Nigeria’s rates of child marriage are some of the highest in Africa.
The Director, Advocacy, Campaign, Media and Communication, SCI Nigeria,
Amanuel Mamo, during the first edition of the ‘Children’s Summit for Democracy Roundtable’ in Abuja, called on the governments to step up implementation of the law.
He noted that children are still passing through serious challenges, which he said is worrisome as the law was meant to be a rescue to the plight of children.
‘It is an extremely important step to have the [political] will and interest in making commitments to protect, respect and fulfill the rights of children, but it is another
thing to implement those commitments and promises’, he said.
‘In this regard, Save the Children International Nigeria hugely appreciates the bold and necessary steps that the Borno, Zamfara, Yobe and Katsina state governments for passing the Child Protection Law, just in the last most recent months and years.
‘Another challenge, as well as opportunity, is yet ahead, and that is the full implementation of the law – that will protect children from the several challenges they are facing’.
Data from UNICEF shows that Nigeria has the largest number of child brides in Africa with more than 23 million girls and women who were married as children, most of them from poor and rural communities.
Child marriage has deep and lasting impacts on women throughout their lives, as it prevents them from making their own life choices, disrupts their education, subjects them to violence and discrimination, and denies their full participation in economic, political, and social life.
Mamo noted that there is no better time to end child marriage than now.
‘It is time to translate promises, commitments and plans into an organised, coordinated, ambitious and achievable sets of actions so that the millions of girls who are to get married in the next few years are rescued to safely go back to school to learn’, he added.
Also, the Speaker of the Borno State Children Parliament, Ibrahim Sunoma, urged government at all levels to stop the ‘war on children’.
‘Another very alarming issue is that of children being affected by armed conflict. These are children you find in the IDP camps, some are in the host communities, some are with their widowed mothers at the edges of communities and go about streets begging for shelter’, he said.
‘These are not privileged children, but children who unfortunately got their parents murdered and are left to grow with the believe that their conscience is their parents’.
Meanwhile, the SCI Youth Ambassador, Maryam Ahmed, said girls have suffered unnecessarily as a result of many factors.
‘Many children, especially girls, in these northern states either do not go to school or are removed from them to likely be married off’, Ahmed said.
She called on states that have yet to domesticate the law, including Adamawa, Bauchi, Gombe, Kano and Zamfara, to urgently adopt it and ensure its full implementation.
Photo source: UNICEF
