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INDICATORS FOR CHILDREN’S RIGHTS ZIMBABWE COUNTRY CASE STUDY INVIOLATA CHINYANGARA, ISRAEL CHOKUWENGA, ROSELYN G. DETE, LINDA DUBE, JOSHUA KEMBO, PRECIOUS MOYO & RATIDZAI SHARON NKOMO |
Introduction
This Report is an account of the process and findings of the Zimbabwe
Country Case Study. As part of the Childwatch International Indicators for
Children’s Rights Project the Case Study examined existing data on children
in the country with the aim of discovering their potential for developing
a national system for monitoring children’s rights. In this process, the
Case Study Team collaborated with government agencies, non-governmental
organizations and academics. The Report does not seek to provide an account
of the situation of children’s rights in Zimbabwe, nor a situational analysis
of the current conditions of children’s lives. It is better to think of
it as a description of the state of the data on children, using as its framework
of analysis the two main human rights instruments pertaining to children
in Africa.
The international context of children’s rights
Although children’s rights have been on the international agenda since
shortly after the First World War, it is only since the United Nations International
Year of the Child in 1979 that legally-binding treaties have been drawn
up between nations, providing specific rights for children as a special
group of human beings. The Convention on the Rights of the Child, which
was adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations in 1989, makes
it clear that children are independent subjects and have rights (Hart, 1992:6).
The African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child, which was adopted
by the Organization of African Unity in 1990, insists that children have
duties as well as rights. These two international legal instruments are
the basis of the Childwatch International Indicators for Children’s Rights
Project in Zimbabwe, and increasingly provide the framework through which
children and their welfare are increasingly viewed in all African nations.
The Convention on the Rights of the Child
The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child is internationally
binding legislation that was swiftly ratified by most member states. Zimbabwe
ratified September 1990.
The main challenge of the Convention on the Rights of the Child is implementation.
It was relatively easy for governments to sign the Convention, but it is
a less simple matter to ensure that children enjoy all the rights provided
by this treaty, let alone monitor its implementation.
The African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the
Child
The African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child was born out
of the feeling by African member states to the United Nations that the drafting
of the Convention on the Rights of the Child missed important socio-cultural
and economic realities of the African experience. However, the African Charter
on the Rights and Welfare of the Child is not opposed to the United Nations
Convention on the Rights of the Child. Instead these two pieces of legislation
are complementary. The African Charter stresses on the need to include African
cultural values and experience whenever discussing or considering issues
pertaining to the rights of the child in Africa.
The African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child was adopted
by the Assembly of Heads of States and Government of the Organization of
African Unity in 1990. Zimbabwe signed this Charter in January, 1992. The
African Charter is not yet in force because it has not been ratified by
the necessary 15 Member States of the Organization of African Unity, although
as we write this report only two ratifications are required for it to come
into force.
In June 1996 the Preliminary Report of the Government of Zimbabwe to
the Committee on the Rights of the Child was examined (CRC/15Add. 55, 7
June 1996). While the overall comments from the Committee noted progressive
achievement towards fulfilment of the requirements of the Convention on
the Rights of the Child, a number of concerns were expressed, amongst which
was the need to develop a system to monitor implementation of the Convention
through the collection and analysis of reliable qualitative and quantitative
data:
The Committee notes with concern the lack of an effective mechanism to
ensure systematic implementation of the Convention and the monitoring of
progress achieved. Insufficient measures have been taken to gather reliable
quantitative and qualitative data in all areas covered by the Convention
and in relation to all groups of children, particularly those belonging
to the most disadvantaged groups (ibid, para 14).
The Committee emphasized ‘the importance of developing an affective and
permanent system of monitoring the implementation of the Convention based
on close co-operation between all the relevant government ministries and
departments at the national and local levels’ (ibid, para 24) and suggested
that ‘the system of data collection be improved and appropriate disaggregated
indicators identified with a view to assessing the progress achieved in
all areas covered by the Convention in all parts of the country in relation
to all groups of children’ (ibid, para 24).
These comments by the Committee on the Rights of the Child identify the
following needs:
- Monitoring systems (at national and local levels). In Zimbabwe as in
all countries that are States Party monitoring systems need to be developed
as systematic and integrated elements of routine data-gathering activities. - Realistic indicators (from what exists at the moment, data and indicators
currently in use), which should be based on reliable qualitative and quantitative
data and the indicators should be disaggregated.
Developments towards systematic monitoring of the
implementation of the Convention
In 1992 the Committee on the Rights of the Child appealed to the United
Nations system, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and the research community
for assistance in setting up pilot researches in various countries across
the globe to appraise the possibility of establishing monitoring systems.
In response to this need, Childwatch International (CWI) designed a project
that is developing a universal process for identifying and developing indicators
in national contexts, as part of a strategy for developing routine children’s
rights monitoring systems. The Country Case Study in Zimbabwe, funded by
Redd Barna-Zimbabwe, is the fifth in the series of eight country case studies,
which began in 1994 and will end in 1998.
The Childwatch International Indicators for Children’s Rights project
has six main operational principles:
- National monitoring systems for children’s rights can be built on the
foundation of already-existing data relating to children, including social
indicators and childhood indicators; - To create such systems, it is necessary to regroup the articles of
the Convention on the Rights of the Child in each country, according to
national understandings both of childhoods and of statistical data relating
to children; - Measurement and calculation of indicators requires prior conceptual
and definitional work, in each national context, in order to be sure that
indicators actually measure and monitor the rights set out in the Convention; - Monitoring systems for children’s rights frequently entail recalculating
existing statistical data. Children’s rights indicators require appropriate
disaggregations of data collected, including those used in childhood indicators.
Typical disaggregations include gender, ethnicity, religion and geographical
location. - Children’s rights indicators require children-centred data in which
children are the units of measurement and childhood is the unit of analysis. - Statistical data from different sources need to be reconciled, which
normally entails, as a minimum, harmonizing the age groups through which
different agencies collect and present data relating to children.
Aims of the Zimbabwe Country Case Study Project
In June 1996, Childwatch International commissioned a Country Case Study
to examine existing data on children in Zimbabwe in order to assess their
potential for developing indicators for children’s rights, with the overall
aim of contributing to the development of a routine system for monitoring
children’s rights in Zimbabwe.
The aims of the Zimbabwe Country Case Study Project are:
- To provide an evaluation of existing data on children with respect
to their potential for developing indicators for monitoring children’s
rights; - To provide the basis of support for Government reporting to the United
Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child; - To reflect current issues in children’s rights and welfare in Zimbabwe,
by analyzing the data on children available, but not to provide
a situational analysis of children; - To consider data requirements for possible supplementary monitoring
for eventual report to the monitoring body for the African Charter on the
Rights and Welfare of the African Child.
A further, long-term aim of the project is to contribute to capacity
building within child research and child welfare, and monitoring children’s
rights in Zimbabwe. Users of the monitoring system are likely to be community
workers, children’s advocates, government administrators, local and international
NGOs, inter-governmental organizations such as UNICEF, and the United Nations
Committee on the Rights of the Child.
A specific aim in Zimbabwe is to seek ways of strengthening the National
Program of Action for Children (NPA), located in the Ministry of Health
and Child Welfare, which is associated with a network that has the potential
to act as a watchdog for children’s rights and welfare in the country.
The basic purpose of this Report is to provide information about the
data available on children in Zimbabwe, and thus to fulfil some of the main
aims of the Zimbabwe Country Case Study Project. Thus the Report:
- Provides an evaluation of existing data on children in Zimbabwe;
- Reflects on current issues in children’s rights and welfare in Zimbabwe;
- Develops a basis for assessing the potential of the data for developing
indicators for monitoring children’s rights.
Establishing the project in Zimbabwe
One key initial undertaking in setting up the project was the establishment
of the Country Case Study Team and a National Advisory Committee. The Team
consisted of Zimbabwean scholars, each of whom has at least a first degree
in an appropriate discipline. It was managed by a National Coordinator,
in collaboration with the International Coordinator of the Childwatch Indicators
for Children’s Rights Project. The National Advisory Committee includes
representation from the funding agency (Redd Barna – Zimbabwe), government
agencies whose main area of work includes children’s issues, local and international
NGOs, and academic institutions. The tasks of the National Advisory Committee
are:
- To support the Country Case Study Team and the National Coordinator;
- To ensure that the results and recommendations of the Country Case
Study Team are incorporated into the national mechanisms for monitoring
children’s rights and reporting to the UN. Committee on the Rights of the
Child.
This report is based on a Protocol for collecting secondary data on children
in Zimbabwe that was developed by the National Advisory Committee, together
with the Country Case Study Team and the International Coordinator (For
the Protocol document see Appendix 1). The process of building up the protocol
document followed the process established by Childwatch International in
previous Country Case Studies in Senegal, Vietnam, Thailand and Nicaragua
(Ennew & Miljeteig, 1996).
The process began with a workshop that familiarized Zimbabwean professionals
in the areas of child welfare with the Convention on the Rights of the Child
as well as the African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child through
critical readings of both instruments. Several problems common to both instruments
were identified, of which the most important were the definition of ‘child’
in different cultural contexts, the meaning of ‘participation’ and the meaning
of the phrase ‘the best interests of the child’. In addition, this workshop
introduced the professionals to the concepts of indicator development in
the context of establishing a monitoring system based on regrouping the
articles of both the Convention and the African Charter.
The Protocol was developed during a further workshop, in which the Country
Case Study Team members were joined by several of the members of the National
Advisory Committee. The first task was to finish the process of regrouping
articles begun in the first workshop. The Convention on the Rights of the
Child contains 40 articles that can be monitored. It is initially tempting
to think of finding an indicator for each article, but this would be the
least realistic approach. Many of the articles cover broad areas, such as
health and economic exploitation, which require more than one indicator,
and some articles have overlapping concerns, for which indicators might
be shared. Thus it makes more sense to construct systems of linked indicators
based on regroupments, or clusters, of related articles. These structured
groups can produce a nation-wide monitoring system, as well as a system
to monitor implementation of the Convention at the local or grassroots level.
The articles were regrouped according to the range of phenomena they
cover in both general and specific social and culture contexts, and corresponding
operational concepts were then developed. These concepts then led to the
development of a list of data that would be appropriate data for measurement
and could thus form the basis of an indicator system. Regrouping is based
on the understanding that the interpretation of the Convention in any social
and cultural context will vary, just as ideas about children and childhood
differ between cultures and societies. Thus the key question for regrouping
was ‘How might the articles be structured into groups in order to best reflect
Zimbabwean national realities?’ The participants in the workshops answered
this question through considering the inter-relatedness of articles, as
well as the complementary relationship between the UN Convention on the
Rights of the Child and the OAU African Charter on the Rights and Welfare
of the African Child.
Some other Country Case Studies, like some of the more commonly-used
regroupings or clusterings of the articles of the Convention, have identified
certain articles as general principles that govern the interpretation of
all other articles. Thus the Senegal Country Case Study largely followed
a similar clustering to that identified by many Northern experts, in which
Articles are identified as belonging within one of three broad groupings:
Provision, Protection and Participation, all of which are governed by overall
principles, such as the definition of a child or non-discrimination.
In the Zimbabwe Country Case Study, on the other hand, the regrouping
followed from a consideration of national realities and pre-occupations,
in the context of what might broadly be called African contexts. Thus a
primary consideration was that encompassed by the first group, in which
the relationship between children and parents in Zimbabwean society is problematized,
in order to capture the realities of the ways in which childhoods are experienced.
These are likely to be different from the nuclear family structures implicit
in the Convention, and to require a reconsideration of the definitions of
parent as well as understanding the different texture of child-parent relationships
in which children have responsibilities as well as rights (see Article 31
of the African Charter). Other regroupings in the Zimbabwean Protocol, like
the African Charter, cluster the Articles of the Convention around problems
affecting children with particular force in African contexts at the present
time. The main groups are thus:
- Children-parent relationships;
- Social and economic deprivation;
- Protection and survival;
- Juvenile justice and rehabilitation;
- Education and development;
- Monitoring and reporting.
Within each of these main groups, sub-groups of articles were identified,
taking into consideration the considerable overlap involved in some cases
(Figure 1). This was in order to be able to establish the fundamental concepts
within each group and thus establish the data that would be relevant for
operational measurement within a monitoring system. On this basis a Protocol
for searching the current data on children in Zimbabwe was drawn up by the
Country Case Study Team and National Advisory Committee together (Appendix
1). Data collection consisted largely of researching existing data on children,
but also included interviewing some key individuals responsible for collecting
and/or publishing this information.
In analyzing the data they collected, the Country Case Study Team members
had to:
- Analyze the origins of the data, their accessibility and use;
- Critically examine:
The methods used in the original data collection and analysis;
Children-centredness in the data;
Disaggregation in the data;
- Identify other strengths and weaknesses of the data;
- Identify the main ideas in operation in each given area of study, and
thus clarify any assumptions about children, families, society, culture,
and tradition implicit in the collection and presentation of data about
children in Zimbabwe.
This Report follows the structure of the regrouping and Protocol document,
but does not examine all the subgroups. This is partly because of the scarcity
of data in some areas, which speaks for itself in terms of the need for
new and better data. However, an in-depth consideration of certain subgroup
themes enables us to focus on particular issues raised in the analysis of
the information we collected, in terms of the underlying assumptions involved
in data collection by the responsible agencies, as well as the quality and
availability of the data themselves. Thus, although the Report is structured
around the main groups or clusters each chapter examines a selection of
data only, in order to highlight particular themes that we considered of
greatest importance when examining the potential of the data for developing
a monitoring system for children’s rights.
Chapter 1 begins the Report by describing some dominant themes, which
run through or affect all the data we collected. Thus, instead of identifying
general principles in the Convention through which to structure the Report,
the Team has identified general issues within the data themselves, so that
the structure is determined ‘from the bottom up’, according to the way childhood
and children are conceptualized within Zimbabwe, and the corresponding ways
in which data about children are produced.
The Report then considers each main group in turn, focusing on particular
data sets, and pointing to the inter-relationships between them. This is
followed by a district level case study, which examines the mechanisms for
data collection at grass-roots level. The final chapter examines the consequences
of the foregoing discussion for establishing a national system for monitoring
children’s rights.
Figure 1: The regrouping of the Articles of the
Convention on the Rights of the Child in Zimbabwe
| GROUP | SUB-GROUP | ARTICLES |
| Children-parent relationships | States’ respect for parental responsibility; Children are not to be separated from their parent(s) against their will; Right to leave the state for reunion; Freedom of thought, conscience and religion; Right to an adequate standard of living; Registration after birth; Interference with privacy; Education for development. |
5, 7, 9,10, 14, 16, 18, 27, 29, |
| Social and economic deprivation | Social security; economic exploitation. | 4, 26, 32-4 |
| Protection and survival | Definition of a child; Preservation of dignity; Child abuse and neglect; Displaced and refugee children; Basic needs; Discrimination; Economic exploitation. |
1, 2, 3, 6, 8, 11, 16, 19, 20, 22, 24, 25, 27, 28, 30, 32, 33, 34, 35 |
| Juvenile justice, rehabilitation and implementation | Legislation on juvenile justice; Identity; Primary health care; Available resources; Re-education; Economic exploitation. |
1, 4, 8, 9, 11, 17, 20, 23, 24, 25, 28, 32, 28, 30, 35, 37, 38, 39, 40 |
| Education and development | Provision of health care services and rehabilitation; Education system; Information; Standard of living; Drug abuse and trafficking. |
17, 18, 23, 24, 27, 28, 29, 33 |
| Monitoring and reporting | 43-54 |