Sensitising civil society and human rights institutions on children affected by conflict

Children caught in armed conflict are rarely invisible to the people around them. They are known to a teacher, a nurse, a neighbour, a local monitor. What is usually missing is the path that carries what those people know into a record a national institution can act on.

BADEF convened this workshop to work on that path. Over five days in Kampala, civil society actors and national human rights institutions from across the COMESA region examined how cases involving conflict affected children move, or fail to move, from a community to a mandated body.

The sessions were deliberately practical. Participants compared the reporting mechanisms operating in their own countries, identified the points at which a case typically stalls, and looked at what each institution is actually empowered to do once a report reaches it.

Because participants came from different national systems, much of the value lay in the comparison. A mechanism that works in one country gave colleagues elsewhere something concrete to argue for at home, and the regional framing made it harder to treat any single gap as unavoidable.