Monitoring is dependent on a large range of stakeholders

The African Children’s Committee co-ordinates the overall monitoring and evaluation of the Agenda.

The Children’s Committee will co-ordinate the implementation, monitoring and evaluation at the continental level. It will, on a continuous basis, collect and share best practices, as emerging from the State-reporting process, reports by civil society organisations and otherwise.

Children should be involved in the monitoring and accountability process for this Agenda.

At the national level, the State co-ordinates an annual review of progress and remaining challenges in achieving the objectives of eachAction Plan,by facilitating a stakeholder platform or meeting, attended by all relevant stakeholders, including non- State partners and children, to review the achievements towards the implementation of the Agenda. State parties undertake to consolidate these annual reviews into a comprehensive report for each of the five phases, and to submit these reports to the African Children’s Committee.

After the end of every period in the five-phased implementation process (2020, 2025, 2030, 2035 and 2040), the African Children’s Committee will facilitate a stakeholders’ platform meeting in respect of State parties, attended by all relevant stakeholders, including non-State partners and children, to review the achievements relating to the implementation of the Agenda at the national and regional level, in order to identify the main challenges and formulate priorities for the following five years.

Following the stakeholder platform, the African Children’s Committee will submit the outcome of these deliberations in the form of State of the Africa’s Children Report to the Assembly of the Union.

The Action Plan for the first phase, ending in 2020, is attached to this Agenda. The relevant AU organs will develop an Action Plan for each of the subsequent five-year periods, based on the results of the assessment of the previous period by State parties and the AU Assembly.

There is a need for reliable data-gathering system

Effective monitoring requires reliable and useful data. There is a dire need for reliable scientific data, including statistics to monitor progress towards improving children’s lives. Data gathering must be effective and must be disaggregated to ensure appropriate targets are set – and met – for particular disadvantaged groups of children. The full potential of productive interaction between governments, international partners, African and other scholars and researchers and children’s rights advocates should be harnessed to provide data-based child advocacy. States should, in collaboration with national partners, generate solid national evidence on violence against children. The development of national and decentralised routine data collection systems to monitor States’ progress on the implementation of this Agenda, specifically, and the African Children’s Charter, generally, should be supported. States should put in place a monitoring and reporting process in order to develop a detailed understanding of the scale of the problem, and to track progress.

To the extent possible, States should harmonise and integrate the monitoring of their national implementation plans with periodic State reporting to the African Children’s Committee and the UN CRC Committee, and under the Universal Periodic Review, the SDGs and other relevant international or national frameworks.