The event was organized by the African Partnership to End Violence against Children (APEVAC), the Africa Child Policy Forum (ACPF), UNICEF and WHO, and featured regional experts from West Africa and Central Africa in the first session, and East and Southern Africa in the second, including members of the Africa Hub of the Coalition for Good Schools.

Expert Voices from the Africa Child Policy Forum

In an effort to sustain momentum from the Global Ministerial Conference on Ending Violence against Children and support Member States in implementing their national commitments, this webinar brought together countries from the East African Community (EAC) and Southern Africa Development Community (SADC) to discuss breakthrough areas recognised as critical accelerators in preventing violence against children, including leveraging schools and the education system as a platform for prevention, early detection and response to violence.

Dr. Shimelis Tsegaye, Director of Programmes, ACPF, reminded us that “as we all know, a promise does not protect a child. We must work together to ensure pledges are translated into concrete action.” He also discussed the promising stories coming out of Uganda, a long-standing leader and Pathfinding country in the region, where the government is working across ministries and civil society to prevent VAC, namely through collaborative work to take the Good School Toolkit to scale. 

“Pledges are a start, but they are not a finish line. Together we can turn these pledges into a continent wide movement for every child to grow up safe, protected, and full of possibility.”

Saba Lishan, Coordinator, APEVAC, ACPF 

Partnership between civil society and government

From the Ministry of Gender, Labour and Social Development (MGLSD, Uganda), Lydia Najjemba Wasula shared progress from the country starting with a strong policy framework including the Child Protection Act updated as recently as 2024 to create safe spaces for children across all settings.

“Schools play a key role in shaping values, ethics and citizenship by exposing children to norms, rules and culturally appropriate behaviors,” she shared, “and schools are central to preventing and responding to VAC.” She continued to detail national life-skills education program for adolescents 10-19 years, school policies and codes of conduct focused on alternatives to corporal punishment and guidelines for reporting, referral and response, as well as the ongoing integration of positive discipline and psychosocial support into schools’ operational cultures nation-wide. 

Building on this experience from civil society perspective, Hope Wambi, Coordinator for the Africa Hub of the Coalition and VAC Prevention Coordinator at Raising Voices, spoke on Monday to the need for national and regional collaboration between civil society and the education sector to address VACiS.

“To make a difference at scale, we need to work at every level of the education system. Government leadership is important, and government/civil society partnerships are crucial. Raising Voices has been pursuing such a path with an intervention that is going to scale, and the Government of Uganda has, as one of its pledges in Bogotá, committed to take the intervention to every school by 2030. We call to every African government to commit to take a school-based violence prevention intervention to every school in their country.”

Hope Wambi, VAC Prevention Coordinator, Raising Voices, and Coordinator, Africa Hub, Coalition for Good Schools

Sharing from partnerships between civil society and government

Yvonne Laruni, VAC Prevention Technical Advisor at Raising Voices, later elaborated on the practical experience of using a whole school approach to prevent violence against children, calling to governments across the continent to collaboratively take this issue on as a priority.

We also heard from Abir Nur, Research Fellow with Population Council, on social worker training, community dialogues and student sensitization, and a child-friendly screening tool for sexual violence in primary schools, in collaboration with MGLSD in Uganda’s Kyandongo refugee settlement, highlighting the power of working with local resource persons to train school personnel in VAC prevention and response programming.

Nankali Maksud, Child Protection Regional Adviser at UNICEF’s Eastern and Southern Africa Office, made a compelling case on the way forward, reminding us how 1 in 2 learners in Sub-Saharan Africa have experienced bullying, 1 in 2 boys have engaged in physical fights, and 60 million girls worldwide are sexually assaulted on their way to school, further highlighting how there is significant work to be done. She flagged that while Africa is a “policy-rich continent”, we are failing at implementing the policies we have in place. She called for a continental shift towards stronger implementation of these policies, which ultimately means a shift in financing.

“A whole school approach establishes mechanisms, systems and structures to ensure children are safe…to make a difference at scale, we need to work with every level of the education system. To scale, we need to work with government, we cannot do this on our own…the call is for every African Government to commit to prevent violence and take up interventions at the highest level.”

Yvonne Laruni, VAC Prevention Technical Advisor, Raising Voices 

Key Takeaways

These discussions reminded us not only of what is possible when government and civil society work in close collaboration on addressing violence in schools, as has been done in Uganda, but reminded us of the natural opportunity schools present to address this problem at a systemic level, and to uphold the primary purpose and possibility of our learning institutions.

1) Schools present a natural opportunity: children spend the majority of their time at schools, their schools are governed and accountable to the surrounding community, and there are mechanisms inbuilt into schools to influence norms.

2) Schools are an opportunity to address this problem at a systemic level: we know that people’s lives are profoundly influenced by the power-systems that surround them. For children, the education system has the most sustained influence on their life outcomes. Therefore, it is of strategic importance that we invest resources in addressing how the education sector can prevent violence against children. Any intervention in schools to address violence should engage multiple layers of the school, beginning with the administration and reaching all the way to learners, including teachers, parents, and community members.

3) VAC undermines primary purpose of schools: schools are intended to be spaces that cultivate children’s identity, agency, and understanding of relationships – and the power within those relationships – that dictate how they operate in the world. Non-violence is a pre-requisite for children not just to memorize facts and figures or pass exams, but to ensure that our institutions are places of safety for their development.

4) Schools represent our collective aspirations and hope for the future: focusing on VAC in schools ensures that schools become incubators of what a more just and equal society can look like.

We emerge from this week’s discussions inspired and with profound hope for sub-regions across Africa to continue to lead the global movement to end violence in and through schools, and share learning from the journey with practitioners and change-makers across the Global South.

“As we all know, a promise does not protect a child. We must work together to ensure pledges are translated into concrete action.”

Dr. Shimelis Tsegaye, Director of Programmes, Africa Child Policy Forum