Africa is warming faster than the global average and is witnessing a troubling rise in climate-related extremes. Prolonged droughts parch croplands from the Sahel to the Cape, while torrential rains and storm surges inundate river basins and coastlines. In 2024 alone, an El Niño‑driven drought left nearly 50 million people in Southern Africa facing acute food insecurity, just four years after Cyclone Idai’s floods claimed over 1,300 lives in Mozambique, Zimbabwe and Malawi. Such events no longer read as isolated “natural” disasters; they are symptoms of a climate‑change feedback loop intensified by land‑use change, deforestation and weak water‑management regimes.
Children are caught at the epicentre of this crisis. When crops fail or homes are washed away, children first forgo meals, drop out of school to fetch water, or shelter in overcrowded, disease‑prone camps. Each disrupted service, clean water, education, and primary healthcare has implications for normative guarantees and rights protected by the African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child (ACERWC). Yet emergency responses rarely foreground these normative guarantees. Decisions about water allocation, relocation, or school reconstruction are often made without consulting or counting children, breaching the Charter’s primacy of the child’s best interests.
This submission examines the interface between droughts, floods, and children’s rights in Africa. It is divided into six parts. Following this introduction, Part 2 sketches a brief geography of droughts, floods and oceans, while Part 3 connects floods, droughts, and the ocean with climate change. Part 4 of the submission focuses on the impact of droughts and floods on children, while Part 5 links the impact with children’s Rights under the ACERWC. Part six is the conclusion.
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