This accredited five-day course provides cutting-edge education in child rights and child law for health and allied professionals – including up-to-date training on consent to medical treatment and the reporting of child abuse and neglect as outlined in the Children’s Act. It examines the relationship between children’s rights and child health, and aims to equip health and allied professionals with the necessary knowledge and skills to realise children’s rights in their daily practice.
South Africa’s comprehensive range of laws, policies and programmes to realise children’s rights need to be adequately resourced in order to reach all children in need. This project conducts annual child-centred analyses of government’s budgets to assess whether the state is allocating and spending adequate budgets to realise children’s rights. Ultimately, the project wants to contribute to ensuring that adequate resources are allocated for the effective delivery of services to children, and that these resources are spent in children's best interests.
Children Count – Abantwana Babalulekile is an ongoing project that provides time-series statistics on the status of children in South Africa to multiple audiences. The statistics and related commentary, as well as information on the data sources, are available at childrencount.ci.org.za.
This project aims to promote the implementation of the Children’s Act (Act 38 of 2005, as amended by Act 41 of 2007) that came into operation on 1 April 2010. The main implementation challenges are a lack of adequate human resources, a history of a low budget allocation and expenditure base for social services for children, and the need for knowledge and understanding among practitioners and the public on how to interpret and apply the new law.