Day of the African Child 2025 | Children's Rights
Each year, Day of the African Child is celebrated on 16th June, to commemorate the Soweto uprising of 16th June 1976, when over 1,000 South African children were injured, and 100 more tragically killed, as student marches about the quality and language of their education were met with violence.
Since 1991, the day focuses on a different theme which directly impacts African children’s lives and this year, the theme is: “Planning and budgeting for children's rights: progress since 2010”.
African Children’s Fund and Children’s Rights
We talk a lot about the educational programmes we support, but our partners in Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda and Zimbabwe also emphasise the importance of children’s rights, with those in Kenya and Tanzania specifically focussing on running a legal aid programme for children and families who would not otherwise be able to access the legal system.
Today, therefore, represents an ideal opportunity for us to focus on the Happy Kids International programme in Kenya, or HAKI for short.
Justice
Haki is also the Swahili word for justice and since its launch in Thika in 2011, Danny & John of African Children’s Fund Kenya have run the HAKI legal aid programme to provide free legal advice to vulnerable children and their families. This is often focussed on the areas of child support and maintenance, child protection and child abuse.
Though their work is mostly based in Thika and the wider Kiambu & Muranga Counties, their services have extended to people living across Kenya, including the Rift Valley, Western and Northern Kenya and coastal areas.
Danny Wambeu provided the following succinct summary of their 2024 work:
“The legal programme through its free legal services continued to uplift, improve, empower, protect and generally make better, the lives vulnerable children, of their Mothers, Fathers, Grandparents, Guardians and Kin in several significant ways. We attended to 100 Families many involving several children ranging from 1 to 7 children per family in our Office. In addition we gave legal services to many other families through telephone contact.”
2024 Impact
The results produced by HAKI continue to give children hope and opportunity for a brighter future. During 2024, these included:
Securing school fees and payment of other school-related costs from absent parents. In one case, HAKI’s intervention ensured the father of a final year secondary school student paid her school fees, enabling her to sit her crucial final exams.
Availability of medical fees leading to health improvements. HAKI’s mediation with one family ensured a disabled child’s daily medicine, therapy sessions, special diet and carer were paid for by their parent who had left home.
Regular maintenance. As a result of financial settlements secured by HAKI, vulnerable children are able to grow up without concerns over food, shelter and clothing.
Healing families. The work HAKI does to represent vulnerable children also has a positive impact on Mothers, Fathers, Grandparents, Guardians and their siblings, freeing them from stress, worry and shame while allowing them to repair their lives and those of their children, while also being in an improved position to care for them properly.
Poverty is undoubtedly a key driver in the erosion of children’s rights - whether through the exploitation of child labour, the increased likelihood of child marriage or greater risk of physical, gender-based or sexual abuse. When children are able to regularly attend school, they are significantly less likely to face these dangers and they will also spend time learning about their rights, reducing the chance that they or their children will be exposed to such practices in the future.
HAKI - in combination with the Porridge Clubs and Education All Month, Every Month programmes - helps children to do exactly this.
*Please note the photos on this page do not show children support by specific children’s rights programmes.