Much of the scholarly work on Zimbabwe’s land and agrarian reform has largely been premised on the “livelihoods”, “political economy” and the “neo-patrimonial” approaches; much to the neglect of other frameworks. This article attempts to analyse Zimbabwe’s post-2000 land reform experience from a transformative social policy perspective, utilising empirical data obtained from the 2013/14 Sam Moyo African Institute for Agrarian Studies’ six-district-baseline survey. The article argues that although the Fast Track Land Reform Programme has met the redistributive element of the transformative social policy agenda, the productive, protection and social cohesion potentials of the programme are still to reach their maximum potential due to a number of factors. Although a fraction of surveyed households is accumulating, the majority of the peasantry is shown to be struggling due to fundamental, domestic macro-economic challenges; constrained capacity of the state and external factors such as international isolation, which the country continues to face. Primary data utilised for this article was collected by distributing questionnaires in 1090 households in the districts of Chipinge, Chiredzi, Goromonzi, Kwekwe, Mangwe and Zvimba, which represent the country’s five agro-ecological zones. The data utilised was also collected from all the three settlement models (A1, A2 and Communal Areas).

This paper proposes a practical transformative child rights advocacy conceptual framework that is anchored to the African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child for normative guidance. The paper is premised on the understanding that the fulfilment of all rights for children requires a strong accountability mechanism, hence the need for an easy-to-use conceptual framework. The paper highlights tenets that will make an advocacy initiative to be transformative. To achieve the aspiration of a practical, transformative and rich conceptual framework, the paper draws from the structure-process-outcomes paradigm work of Avedis Donabedian on quality assessment. The framework provides a practical format for policy makers, practitioners and rights holders to hold the duty bearers to account.

SUMMARY It has been 30 years since the adoption of the African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child. This article takes the opportunity to reflect on where the child rights discourse is going to allow for proactivity in addressing emerging challenges and changing child rights context on the African continent. Using positional reflexivity as the methodology, I identify what I call six transformative promptings which are engendering a shift to the child rights discourse. I argue that for the discourse to be more erudite in ensuring the protection as well as well-being for children on the African continent, these six issues must be seriously considered. The first issue is a shift from child rights alterity to trans-disciplinarity. The second issue involves the evolution of the child rights promotional obligation. The third issue is on the nexus between exponential urbanisation on the African continent and fulfilment of children 's rights. The fourth issue is on the rise of the nebulous information communication technology. The fifth issue is on addressing cross border child rights violations and lastly the small matter of financing child rights using domestic resource mobilisation. Key words: positional reflexivity; children's rights; African Children's Charter