believed that 20 million children in Sub-Saharan Africa do not have a birth certificate.3 A number of factors explain this state of affairs including poverty, lack of education, discrimination against women, and membership of certain indigenous ethnic groups or belonging to vulnerable social groups such as refugees or migrants. A lack of decentralized, effective, well managed and affordable civil registration systems are also to blame. As a consequence, children become more vulnerable to all sorts of abuses such as recruitment into armed forces, sexual exploitation, child labour, human trafficking, early marriage, disinheritance, etc. Without a birth certificate, it is difficult to establish a child’s parentage and his/her ties with the territory on which he/she was born. This puts the child in a precarious position when it comes to claiming a nationality and exposes him/her to the risk of becoming stateless. This alarming situation impelled the Committee to hold a theme day on birth registration and the rights of the child during its 20th session held in November 2012. At the conclusion of this day, the Committee decided to develop a General Comment on Article 6 of the African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child. The Article provides for the rights to a name, to birth registration and to acquire a nationality. 4. There are hundreds of thousands of people living in Africa who are stateless, and many more whose nationality is in doubt or dispute.4 The causes of this situation can be found in Africa’s history, in the arbitrary creation of the borders of African States, in problems related to the transition from the colonial era to independence and more recent creations of states or transfers of territory, in both historical and contemporary migration, and in deficiencies in nationality laws and their implementation. 3 See Humanium ‘The right to an identity- The global situation: A look at a child identity across the globe’ available at http://www.humanium.org/en/world/right-to-identity/ accessed 25 January 2014. 4 UNHCR estimates that there were at least 10 million stateless people globally in 2011, with the recognition that this is a very approximate figure. See “Stateless People” at http://www. unhcr.org/pages/49c3646c155.html, accessed 3 March 2014. 4