This brief reference surveys the national policy of three representative African countries on the legal guardianship of children who are without parents or families. Focusing on the widely varying legal systems of Côte d’Ivoire, South Africa, and Uganda, the authors highlight guardianship as emblematic of the continent’s shortcomings in child protection laws. The book’s key objective is bridging the communal aspects of traditional African society with the global standards set forth by the Convention on the Rights of the Child and other international entities. To this end, the three frameworks discussed here are compared and their strengths and limitations evaluated as applied to child protection standards in terms of core guardianship issues: Holders of parental authority and responsibilities Appointment of a legal guardian Who qualifies as a legal guardian? Responsibilities of a legal guardian in relation to the child Termination of guardianships The primary audience for Perspectives on the Legal Guardianship of Children in Côte d'Ivoire, South Africa, and Uganda includes academics, researchers, and students in the fields of children’s rights, human rights, legal guardianship, and international law. It will also prove a useful reference for NGOs that focus on children’s rights, social workers and practitioners operating within the context of these three countries, professionals working within the African human rights system, and governmental law- and policymakers.

Few African countries provide for an explicit right to a nationality. Laws and practices governing citizenship leave hundreds of thousands of people in Africa without a country to which they belong. Statelessness and discriminatory citizenship practices underlie and exacerbate tensions in many regions of the continent, according to this report by the Open Society Institute. Citizenship Law in Africa is a comparative study by the Open Society Justice Initiative and Africa Governance Monitoring and Advocacy Project. It describes the often arbitrary, discriminatory, and contradictory citizenship laws that exist from state to state, and recommends ways that African countries can bring their citizenship laws in line with international legal norms. The report covers topics such as citizenship by descent, citizenship by naturalization, gender discrimination in citizenship law, dual citizenship, and the right to identity documents and passports. It describes how stateless Africans are systematically exposed to human rights abuses: they can neither vote nor stand for public office; they cannot enroll their children in school, travel freely, or own property; they cannot work for the government.--Publisher description.

This report reviews positive legislative developments in different regions of the world, with a special emphasis on Africa, to strengthen children’s legal protection from violence as a result of harmful practices, and addresses the interplay between statutory, customary and religious laws.

At a UN General Assembly Special Session in 1999, governments recognised unsafe abortion as a major public health concern, and pledged their commitment to reduce the need for abortion through expanded and improved family planning services, as well as ensure abortion services should be safe and accessible. This technical and policy guidance provides a comprehensive overview of the many actions that can be taken in health systems to ensure that women have access to good quality abortion services as allowed by law.

The 2020 UNODC Global Report on Trafficking in Persons is the fifth of its kind mandated by the General Assembly through the 2010 United Nations Global Plan of Action to Combat Trafficking in Persons. It covers more than 130 countries and provides an overview of patterns and flows of trafficking in persons at global, regional and national levels, based primarily on trafficking cases detected between 2017 and 2019. As UNODC has been systematically collecting data on trafficking in persons for more than a decade, trend information is presented for a broad range of indicators.

This open access book utilizes new data to thoroughly analyze the main factors currently shaping the African housing market. Some of these factors include the supply and demand for housing finance, land tenure security issues, construction cost conundrum, infrastructure provision, and low-cost housing alternatives. Through detailed analysis, the authors investigate the political economy surrounding the continent’s housing market and the constraints that behind-the-scenes policy makers need to address in their attempts to provide affordable housing for the majority in need. With Africa’s urban population growing rapidly, this study highlights how broad demographic shifts and rapid urbanization are placing enormous pressure on the limited infrastructure in many cities and stretching the economic and social fabric of municipalities to their breaking point. But beyond providing a snapshot of the present conditions of the African housing market, the book offers recommendations and actionable measures for policy makers and other stakeholders on how best to provide affordable housing and alleviate Africa’s housing deficit. This work will be of particular interest to practitioners, non-governmental organizations, private sector actors, students and researchers of economic policy, international development, and urban development.

This book focuses on Africa’s challenges, achievements, and failures over the past several centuries using an interdisciplinary approach that combines theory and fact and evidence-based practices and interventions in public health, and argues that most of the health problems in Africa are not a result of scarce or lack of resources, but of the misconceived and misplaced priorities that have left the continent behind every other on the globe in terms of health, education, and equitable distribution of opportunities and access to (quality) health as agreed by the United Nations member states at Alma-Ata in 1978.