Report on the 5th Civil Society Organisations (CSO) Forum held in Addis Ababa, from 22-25 November 2011. The theme of the conference was ‘One Voice for Children in Crisis’, and focused on the realization that while every child is vulnerable to different types of risks, due to difficult and often desperate living conditions, many children face “extraordinary hardships' and are therefore children in crisis.
The conference focused specifically on two out of several crisis conditions namely; child imprisonment and hunger. It also looked at a number of other topical areas such as the extent to which recommendations from the past CSO Forums have been implemented by the African Committee of Experts on the Rights and Welfare of Children (ACERWC), an assessment of progress in the last decade since the adoption of the African common position on an Africa fit for children, the progress and challenges faced by the ACERWC in executing their mandate, Education of the African Child, the plight of children in the horn of Africa, child imprisonment, Justice and protection in Africa, child participation and capacity building of CSOs.