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Having a nationality is something most people take for granted – but to those who do not have one, this lack often sentences them to a life of discrimination, frustration and despair. This problem is much more wide-spread than many might think: it affects at least 10 million people worldwide, and every ten minutes another child is born stateless. In Africa, we have data on nearly three-quarters of a million stateless people, but know the real number is significantly higher.
Imagine what life is like for most of the people who are unable to prove their nationality. They cannot send their children to school, hospitals will not provide them treatment, they cannot get a job, marry or move around freely. They live as if they were invisible, and when stateless people die, many authorities will not even issue a death certificate – as if they had never existed.
When it is present on a large scale, statelessness can also fuel displacement and instability. But perhaps even more importantly, denying people a nationality is a missed opportunity for countries on the way to development and prosperity. Ensuring that everyone can enjoy their right to a nationality will allow societies to draw on the energy and talents of hundreds of thousands of people who today, legally speaking, do not exist.
For all of these reasons, UNHCR has recently launched a global campaign to end statelessness within the next ten years. There is a lot of positive international momentum now which makes this an ambitious but possible goal, and I count on the strong support of the African Union and its Member States to help us achieve it.
UNHCR works very closely with African governments – in the exercise of its legal mandate to ensure refugee protection, and within the inter-agency cluster approach, supporting the protection of people who have been forcibly displaced within the borders of their own countries. This partnership with African States benefits from Africa's exceptionally strong regional legal frameworks for protection.
The OAU Convention of 1969 set the cornerstone for refugee protection in Africa, grown from this continent's long-standing tradition of solidarity with people uprooted by conflict. The Convention solidified that commitment, and millions of people have found sanctuary in the 45 years since its adoption. From the wars of independence to the refugee crises of today, countries and communities across the continent kept their borders open to refugees and shared what they had with new arrivals even when they themselves were struggling to make ends meet.
Forty years after the OAU Convention's fundamental contribution to the international refugee protection regime, the African Union adopted another ground-breaking treaty: the Kampala Convention on internally displaced persons. With this, Africa became the first region in the world to have a legally binding instrument on the protection of people displaced within their own countries. 39 States have signed this landmark instrument since then, and several are in the process of developing national laws and policies based on the Convention... CONTINUE FOR MORE
The African Executive | The Right to Nationality in Africa
http://www.africanexecutive.com/modules/magazine/articles.php?article=8273&magazine=537
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Replies
This is terrible. However, maybe the problem is the borders themselves. There is a time when there were no borders in Africa - before they were imposed by Europeans.
Union Nation only pays lip service to topics concerning Afrika. Why Afrikans have problem is rooted in economic situation on the Afrika continent.Lets work on Foreign power taking Afrika resources . Let educate young Afrikans to drop their past colonial master customs ,values, and methods of trade. Most important Find a political system,that address our needs and not those of people outside of the continent.Tkae back land given to foreign cooperations . Direct all resource into the hand of the people , their education , housing . Unite all afrikan countries and promote Pan Afrikanism on the continent and any country outside of Afrika that afrikans reside. Trade laws that benefit the Afrikan people . This is how you begin solving the problem of misplaced afrikan . Until Afrikan do this , nothing will change.
I agree with what you are saying. There were economic and political systems in place in Africa before the Europeans destroyed them during their occupation of Africa. Click here for my blog: Invasion 1897.