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Eritrea’s 2025 ACRWC Report Highlights Gains in Child Welfare and Self-Reliant Social Policy

By Nardos Berhane••04 min read
Eritrea’s 2025 ACRWC Report Highlights Gains in Child Welfare and Self-Reliant Social Policy
Eritrea Periodic Report on the African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child (ACRWC).

The Government of Eritrea has submitted its Fourth Periodic Report on the African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child (ACRWC), covering the years 2020 to 2024.
It is a dense, data-rich document — 174 pages of policy detail, charts, and social indicators — that quietly rewrites the narrative about how a resilient Horn of Africa nation, under sanctions and financial isolation, continues to invest in its children.

A coordinated national effort

The report, compiled through an inter-ministerial process led by the Ministry of Labour and Social Welfare, draws contributions from eleven ministries, national unions, civil society organizations, and statistical agencies. It stresses cooperation over charity: Eritrea’s child-rights work, it notes, is “a matter of national responsibility, not donor dependency.”

Among its recent milestones, Eritrea acceded to the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) in December 2024 and updated its National Social Protection Policy (2022-2026). The government also launched a comprehensive health sector plan that ties reproductive, maternal, and adolescent health directly to the goal of universal health coverage.

Education: universal and expanding

Education remains free and compulsory through basic level — and still free through secondary and vocational streams.
Between 2019 and 2024, the number of schools at every level increased, with special attention to rural and nomadic areas. Female enrolment rose steadily; gender parity now hovers near 0.9 across the system. The report lists 35 new schools serving nomadic children and the expansion of special-needs facilities, including new deaf-education centers in Keren and Mai-Habar.

Adult literacy also continues to rise: more than 37,000 adults participated in 2023–24 programs, nearly 90 percent of them women. Complementary Elementary Education centers — designed for girls and out-of-school youth — enrolled over 23,000 learners, three-quarters of whom completed the course.

Health and survival indicators

Eritrea’s health system, anchored in Primary Health Care, now covers roughly 80 percent of the population within 10 kilometers of a facility, and 98 percent of pregnant women receive antenatal and postnatal care.
Key child-survival figures improved sharply:

  • Under-five mortality fell from 40 to 35 per 1,000 live births between 2020 and 2024.
  • Infant mortality dropped from 32 to 26, and neonatal deaths from 16 to 14.
  • Vaccination coverage reached above 95 percent nationwide, with new HPV and Meningitis-A vaccines added to the schedule.

Maternal health followed the same trend. Deliveries attended by skilled health workers rose from 74 to 84 percent, supported by the construction of maternity waiting homes in remote zones.

Protecting children and families

The report devotes long sections to the protection of orphans, children with disabilities, and vulnerable households.
Over 6,100 families received income-generating support, while 1,100 heads of households were trained in vocational skills.
Community-based group homes and family reunification remain the preferred care model for orphans, replacing large institutional orphanages.
The government continues to provide monthly stipends to the families of martyrs, reaching Nakfa 340 million annually; 37 percent of beneficiaries are orphaned children and youth.

Ending harmful practices

The campaign against female genital mutilation and child marriage is one of Eritrea’s most measurable social transformations.
Mapping conducted in 2023–24 across 1,086 villages found that over 93 percent of respondents know the harms of FGM, 96 percent support its abolition, and no girls under five were circumcised in 85 percent of surveyed villages.
Officials say Eritrea aims to eradicate FGM well before the global 2030 target.

Governance, law, and civic participation

The report rebuffs long-recycled allegations about the “militarization” of Eritrean youth. It clarifies that all students completing Grade 11 attend Sawa Education and Training Center for Grade 12, where the average age is 18 years — in line with the National Service Proclamation, which prohibits under-age recruitment.

It also reaffirms the constitutional guarantees of freedom of religion, association, and expression, citing active youth clubs and media programs such as Fiyorina and Hello Children that are produced by and for young audiences.

Civil-society participation, the report insists, is governed not by prohibition but by transparency and accountability, under Proclamation 145/2005, which requires NGOs to demonstrate genuine capacity and alignment with national priorities.

Challenges and context

In its closing section, the report acknowledges the external pressures hampering development:
recurrent droughts, regional instability, and years of sanctions that disrupted access to financing and correspondent banking systems.
Yet, Eritrea emphasizes that social spending — roughly 19 percent of domestic resources in 2024 — continues to prioritize health, education, and social welfare, even under austerity.

“The State of Eritrea will continue its endeavors to raise the level of protection, respect and fulfillment of human rights,” the report concludes, calling for cooperation based on “objectivity, non-selectivity, and non-politicization.”

A quiet rebuttal to old narratives

Beyond the statistics, the tone of the report is firm but measured — a country describing its social progress without self-promotion and without apology.
For decades, much of the international conversation about Eritrea has revolved around sanctions, isolation, and accusation.
This report, by contrast, speaks in the language of systems, plans, and results — offering not a defensive argument, but a record.

For those who still imagine Eritrea as a closed or stagnant state, its 2025 ACRWC submission reads like something else entirely:
a nation charting its own course, investing in children not because it is instructed to, but because it chooses to.

#Eritrea#Development#Africa#Healthcare#Education
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