The overarching aim of ACPF’s The African Report on Children with Disabilities: Promising starts and persisting challenges is to provide description, analysis and synthesis of the situation of children with disabilities across Africa, and to provide concrete recommendations for future policy and programme reform. The report reviews the situation of children with disabilities from a pan-African perspective, and presents recommendations to promote inclusive and accessible laws, policies, and programmes for children with disabilities throughout Africa. The report is based on extensive research and evidence generated by ACPF and other institutions.

The lack of reliable and appropriately disaggregated data on children with disabilities is an impediment to the formulation of legal frameworks and their  implementation. The lack of reliable data stems in part from a lack of standardised definitions of disability and a general lack of nationally representative data. Existing ambiguities in data are also a result of no distinction being made between degrees of severity of impairment. In addition, data is affected by the fact that parental stigma exacerbates low birth registration of children with disabilities. For example, more than 79 per cent of children with visual impairments and 24 per cent of children with multiple disabilities are not registered in Ethiopia, while in Uganda, about 79 per cent of children with multiple disabilities and 58 percent of children with intellectual impairments are not registered at birth. More than one billion people, or 15 per cent of the world’s population, have a disability. The World Disability Report (WHO/World Bank, 2011) estimates that there are between 93 and 150 million disabled children aged under 14 years. The prevalence for moderate and severe disability in this age cohort in Africa is 6.4 per cent.