1. Introduction: The Missing Subject in BHR
In today’s world, Business and Human Rights frameworks speak extensively about risk, accountability, and due diligence. Yet it is striking that a simple question remains largely unaddressed: where is the child in the African context? African Business and Human Rights (BHR) practice provides a foundation for rethinking corporate accountability, yet existing governance systems fail to recognise children as direct and indirect stakeholders. Children remain structurally invisible across labour, environmental, supply chain, and community impact frameworks. This contribution advances three claims. First, prevailing BHR models fail to capture the full spectrum of child-specific risks, including safety, environmental harm, and community-level impacts. Second, current due diligence approaches are compliance-driven, adult-centric, and reactive, prioritising remediation after harm rather than prevention. Third, African governance traditions, including community engagement, legal pluralism, and participatory accountability, offer operational pathways for embedding child-centred oversight beyond formal BHR systems. Methodologically, the contribution adopts a doctrinal and governance analysis, linking international legal frameworks, the Children’s Rights and Business Principles, and sectoral evidence from African extractive industries. It concludes that a child-centred governance architecture requires mandatory preventive duties, child-sensitive risk indicators, integrated community-based monitoring, and automatic accountability triggers. BHR must therefore be assessed by its capacity to prevent harm, protect children, and ensure non-repetition as a system-wide governance function.
Consider a hypothetical: a child in Uganda working in an artisanal mining area is not an anomaly. She is the product of a governance system that does not require businesses to ask where their supply chain practices intersect with contexts familiar to Africa, such as child marriage, conflict-affected households, and customary labour norms. What appears to be an isolated instance of child labour is, in reality, embedded within a broader system that distributes responsibility across businesses, communities, and state institutions without fixing accountability. The African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child offers a different starting point. It centres the lived realities of the African child, including child labour, harmful traditional practices, and situations of armed conflict. Crucially, it requires that decision-making be guided by the four core principles of a child rights-based approach: non-discrimination (Article 3, ACRWC), the best interests of the child (Article 4(1), ACRWC), the right to life, survival and development (Article 5, ACRWC), and the consideration of the views of the child (Articles 4(2) and 7, ACRWC). When Business and Human Rights frameworks are viewed through this lens, their limitations become clear. The issue is not whether businesses affect children, but whether governance requires accountability for that effect.
This piece establishes the African child as a subject of Business and Human Rights; operationalises the child rights-based approach of the African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child in its four pillars. It proceeds to translate lived realities into corporate risk categories; reframes prevention as a mandatory duty; recognises community accountability through legal pluralism; applies the four pillars as criteria for due diligence; and diagnoses structural harm as a system-wide governance failure. It concludes by proposing four operational mechanisms anchored in the Charter
Principle 1 – The African Child as Subject, Not Object
The ACRWC establishes the child as a rights-holder situated within specific lived realities. These realities are not abstract. They include child labour (Article 15), harmful social and cultural practices such as child marriage (Article 21, ACRWC), and situations of armed conflict and displacement (Article 22, ACRWC). These realities define the environments in which children live and in which businesses operate. Yet within prevailing BHR frameworks, these realities are treated as peripheral. They appear as externalities to be managed, rather than as conditions that shape corporate risk and responsibility. A child working in an artisanal mining site, for example, is often framed as a failure of labour regulation. This narrow framing ignores the broader context in which that child exists, including household vulnerability, customary labour expectations, and exposure to conflict. The ACRWC requires a different approach that assumes that these realities exist. The critical question to ask is: what obligations arise when a business operates within them? The issue then becomes: whether governance requires accountability for that effect.
Principle 2 – The Four ACRWC Principles as Operational Framework
The child rights-based approach under the ACRWC operates as an operational framework. When applied to BHR, these principles require a reconfiguration of how corporate risk, responsibility, and accountability are understood and implemented. Non-discrimination demands differentiated and context-specific analysis of impacts on distinct categories of children, including girls, children with disabilities, displaced children, and those engaged in informal economies. The best interest principle imposes a prior obligation on business actors to assess and demonstrate the impact of their operations on children before activities commence, shifting the focus from post-harm remediation to ex ante evaluation. The requirement to consider the views of the child necessitates the design and implementation of accessible, child-sensitive grievance and participation mechanisms that enable children to be heard directly or through appropriate representation in matters affecting them. The right to survival and development further requires that corporate conduct be assessed against its effects on children’s health, environmental conditions, education, and long-term well-being, transforming these considerations into measurable legal standards rather than discretionary concerns.
Principle 3 – Lived Realities as Risk Categories
Prevailing BHR risk frameworks are structured around generic categories such as labour standards, environmental harm, and security practices, but they do not capture the lived realities that define risk for children in African contexts. For instance, a mining company may report compliance by confirming no child labour on site and meeting environmental and security standards. Yet it may not assess whether its operations contribute to child marriage, draw children into informal supply chains, or reinforce unpaid family labour in surrounding communities. The problem is exacerbated where these realities are treated as external to corporate risk assessment, leading to a failure of governance at the point of identification. Business operations intersect with communities where child marriage persists (Article 21), where armed actors recruit or exploit children and where customary practices structure labour expectations. It suffices to note that security arrangements, supply chains, and local partnerships are therefore not neutral as far as they operate within and often reinforce these lived realities. This creates a structural consequence where risks that are not defined cannot be governed. A translation of these lived realities into legally recognised risk categories within BHR systems is the first step to their mitigation.
Principle 4 – Prevention as a Mandatory Duty, Not a Voluntary Goal
The ACRWC imposes a preventive logic that fundamentally alters the timing and nature of corporate accountability. The best interests of the child must be the primary consideration in all actions concerning the child, and States are obliged to ensure, to the maximum extent possible, the survival, protection, and development of the child. The implementation of these principles mitigates harm before it occurs. In the context of BHR, the dominant reliance on post-harm remediation is displaced. It is correct to assert that corporate responsibility demands prior demonstration that business operations have assessed, anticipated, and avoided child-specific harm. Prevention, therefore, becomes a mandatory duty embedded in governance, rather than a discretionary objective within corporate policy. The implementation of the ACRWC requires a shift from compliance to governance, and from reacting to preventing harm.
Principle 5 – Community Accountability as Legal Pluralism
African governance systems extend beyond formal state institutions to include customary authorities, community oversight structures, and participatory forms of dispute resolution. These are existing accountability mechanisms that continue to regulate conduct where formal systems are limited or slow to respond. In practice, business operations are embedded within these systems. For example, where a mining company’s activities expose children to hazardous work, complaints may first be raised before a community leader who engages both the family and company representatives to address the harm, rather than through formal legal channels. In such contexts, local structures often monitor conduct and shape how harm is reported, negotiated, and resolved, particularly where children rely on adults or community intermediaries to have their concerns heard. The ACRWC recognises these dynamics through its emphasis on parental and community responsibilities (Article 20, ACRWC) and the requirement that the views of the child be considered in all matters affecting them. Legal pluralism therefore operates as a site of accountability that must be recognised and strengthened within BHR frameworks, while ensuring alignment with the protective standards of the ACRWC.
Principle 6 – The Four ACRWC Principles as Due Diligence Criteria
The ACRWC Committee has clarified in the Communication against Mauritania that due diligence is not merely procedural, but a substantive obligation requiring the prevention of harm, the investigation of violations, the prosecution of perpetrators, and the enforcement of effective sanctions. This interpretation shifts due diligence from a checklist exercise to a governance function anchored in outcomes. Within the purview of BHR, a reconfiguration of how due diligence is designed and implemented is required. Non-discrimination demands a differentiated analysis of impacts across categories of children, including girls, children with disabilities, displaced children, and those in informal economies. The best interest of the child principle requires that corporate decisions be evaluated against their primary impact on children before operations commence. The consideration of the views of the child necessitates accessible, child-sensitive participation and grievance mechanisms that enable children to be heard directly or through appropriate representation. The right to survival and development further requires that corporate conduct be assessed against measurable impacts on children’s health, environment, education, and long-term well-being. To this end, a child-sensitive due diligence framework, anchored in the ACRWC, has to operate as a governance tool that prioritises prevention, embeds accountability, and ensures that violations trigger investigation, enforcement, and non-repetition.
Principle 7 – Structural Harm and System-Wide Accountability
Harm to children within BHR contexts is a systemic failure across interconnected governance actors. The ACRWC places primary obligations on States to adopt legislative, administrative, and other measures to give effect to children’s rights (Article 1, ACRWC), and the four pillars are engaged as obligations. It is anticipated as a consequence that harm is not embedded within ordinary systems of governance. In practice, responsibility is diffused as businesses externalise risk through supply chains. More often, state institutions fail to enforce protective standards, and community structures may normalise or absorb harm without escalation. For instance, a child engaged in hazardous work within an informal supply chain, or exposed to violence linked to security arrangements, often encounters a system in which no single actor assumes responsibility for prevention or remedy. The failure is therefore cumulative, arising from gaps in coordination, enforcement, and accountability. As a structural consequence, harm persists because the system permits it. The ACRWC requires that accountability be understood across the full governance architecture, ensuring that obligations to prevent, investigate, and remedy violations are triggered across all relevant actors. As such, systemic harm requires system-wide accountability.
Conclusion
The seven principles developed above demonstrate that the failure of BHR frameworks is a failure of design. Children are rendered invisible as subjects, their lived realities are excluded from risk frameworks, due diligence remains procedural rather than substantive, and accountability is diffused across actors without consequence. The ACRWC provides the normative architecture to correct this failure by structuring how risk is defined, how decisions are made, and how accountability is triggered.
From a governance perspective, what follows is a matter of enforcement. Businesses must identify and assess child-specific risks before operations begin, risk frameworks must reflect the lived realities in which harm occurs, and accountability must extend across all actors within the governance system. Where violations arise, they must trigger immediate and non-discretionary responses. BHR should be assessed by the adequacy of its procedures and, most importantly, its capacity to prevent harm, protect children, and ensure non-repetition. Anything less sustains the very system it claims to regulate.
