Media and the Rights of the Child in Africa

The journey to realising the rights of the child could be traced back to almost a century ago with the Geneva Declaration of the Rights of the Child in 1924. But the most significant and most impactful event for children took place 30 years ago with the declaration of the United Nations: the Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) in 1989. It is this convention that has recognised and specified the important role that the media can play in supporting the rights of the child. This chapter thus tries to place media role in child rights promotion and protection with an historical context for the purpose of knowledge flow on the subject. It further discusses the theoretical basis for media intervention in child rights issues while at the same time it attempts to assess how the media has performed in the task assigned to it in the UNCRC. It offers some suggestions on better media performance to galvanise the effort at realising child rights for sustainable development.