Sierra Leone will today 16th June, 2023 join the world in commemorating the Day of the African Child with the theme: ‘Right to participate: Let children be seen and heard’.

The Day is globally commemorated on June 16 – when events are held on the continent and around the world.

One of the aims of the Day of the African Child is to highlight harmful practices such as genital mutilation. Thirty million girls in Africa are in danger of undergoing FGM in the next decade.

The June 16 annual event honours the memories of students who were massacred in Soweto, South Africa, in 1976 for protesting against education injustice and inequality in the apartheid regime.

It was designated as Day of the African Child in 1991 by the African Union and every year events are organised to promote children’s rights.

The biggest event this year is a youth takeover of the Africa Union in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, by 500 young people from countries all over the continent.

After today’s commemoration, there will be 560 days left until the Millennium Development Goals deadline of the last day of 2015 – MDG2 was to ensure that all children in the world are in school and learning.

On 16 June 1976 in Soweto, South Africa, thousands of black schoolchildren took to the streets to protest about the inferior quality of their education and to demand their right to be taught in their own language.

Hundreds of them were shot down; and in the two weeks of protest that followed, more than a hundred people were killed and more than a thousand injured.

To honour their courage and in memory of those killed, in 1991 the Organisation of African Unity (now the African Union) established the Day of the African Child.

The Day also draws attention to the lives of African children today.