What is the status of digital children’s rights?
In this Digital Child Rights Monitor we give insight how the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child (CRC) addressed digital child rights in its 2022 Concluding Observations on Malawi. The priority scale reflects how strongly the CRC highlights an issue in its recommendations — the higher the score, the bigger or more pressing the problem. This scale helps visualize which digital child rights issues the CRC considers most urgent and where Malawi faces its greatest challenges. If a country gets a low priority score it does not necessarily mean the country is doing good, it just means the CRC made little to no mention to it.
Summary
Priority
Infrastructure and Capacity is the only theme receiving high cumulative urgency in Malawi’s 2025 Concluding Observations. This reflects serious concerns regarding the state’s legal, institutional, and technical capacity to address issues relevant to children, including systems that may later affect digital governance.
Priority
No themes fall clearly within the medium-priority category. This absence suggests that digital child rights were not yet framed as a distinct or recurring area of concern in the Committee’s assessment at the time.
Priority
All other digital child rights themes, including online safety and protection, violence and exploitation online, privacy and data protection, digital access and participation, and digital health and well-being, receive little to no attention. This limited coverage is likely linked to the fact that the observations date from 2025, prior to the adoption of General Comment No. 25 in 2021, which substantially strengthened the Committee’s focus on digital environments.
Overview themes
- Digital Access & Participation
- Digital Health & Well-Being
- Infrastructure & Capacity
- Online Safety & Protection
- Privacy & Data Protection
- Violence & Exploitation Online
Digital child rights concerns in Malawi, based on the 2019 Concluding Observations, are almost exclusively concentrated on infrastructure and capacity, which accounts for all recorded urgency in the dataset. Other themes, including online safety and protection, violence and exploitation online, privacy and data protection, digital access and participation, and digital health and well-being, do not feature in the observations. This narrow thematic focus should be interpreted with caution, as the data predates the adoption of General Comment No. 25 in 2021, which significantly clarified and expanded the Committee’s approach to children’s rights in the digital environment.
Infrastructure and capacity
- Cybercrime and cybersecurity laws
- Digitalized systems
- Training of professionals on online offences
Infrastructure and capacity-related digital child rights issues in Malawi are overwhelmingly concentrated on digitalized systems, which account for the entire recorded urgency score. This suggests that the Committee’s primary concern relates to the development and use of digital systems, such as data collection or administrative digitalisation, rather than broader digital risks. Cybercrime and cybersecurity laws, as well as training of professionals, do not feature in the observations, indicating limited attention to enforcement capacity and skills development. Overall, the findings point to a narrow focus on institutional digitalisation, with little emphasis on regulatory frameworks or professional preparedness in the digital environment.
Violence and exploitation online
The Committee does not raise concerns related to violence and exploitation online in its observations on Malawi. Issues such as online sexual exploitation, trafficking through digital platforms, or online harassment are not mentioned. This lack of attention likely reflects the early stage of digital rights monitoring prior to a more explicit focus on online harms.
Digital health and wellbeing
Digital health and well-being receive no attention in the Committee’s observations on Malawi. Issues such as screen time, online addiction, or mental health impacts of digital use are not mentioned. This absence points to limited recognition of digital well-being concerns at the time of reporting.
Online safety and protection
Online safety and protection do not feature in the Committee’s observations on Malawi for this reporting cycle. This suggests that issues such as safeguarding policies, complaint mechanisms, and awareness campaigns related to online risks were not explicitly addressed. The absence of references may reflect the limited integration of digital safety considerations at the time of reporting.
Privacy and data protection
Privacy and data protection are not addressed in the Committee’s observations on Malawi. There are no references to children’s digital privacy, personal data protection, or online surveillance. This absence indicates that privacy-related digital risks were not yet systematically considered within the reporting framework.
Digital access and participation
Digital access and participation are not explicitly discussed in the Committee’s assessment of Malawi. Themes such as access to digital education, participation through digital means, or inclusion of marginalized children online do not appear. This suggests that digital inclusion was not yet a central concern in the reporting period.
Concluding Observations CRC
- “remains seriously concerned … The lack of comprehensive data on children suffering from ill-treatment, abuse and neglect, domestic violence and sexual abuse;”
- “Establish a national database on all cases of violence against children, including ill-treatment, sexual abuse, child abuse and neglect and domestic violence, and develop and implement a monitoring and evaluation system to help determine how child protection systems can best address violence against children.”
- “Establish and maintain a comprehensive and functional database on the number of children in alternative care for effective follow-up.”
- “Collect and analyse data on the situation of all children with disabilities, disaggregated by, inter alia, age, sex, type of disability, ethnic and national origin and geographic location.”
- “Establish and operationalize the national child labour database.”
- “Establish mechanisms for collecting data on cases of internal and cross-border trafficking of children, on investigations and on cases where perpetrators are prosecuted;”
Malawi
2025
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