Governing children on the move in the SADC: postcolonial assemblages, institutional bricolage, and the production of vulnerability

Unaccompanied and separated migrant children move through a Southern African governance landscape in which extensive rights commitments coexist with weak and uneven protection. This article asks how layered regional and national arrangements produce or mitigate protection gaps for children on the move in the Southern African Development Community (SADC). It reports a structured critical review of 19 legal, policy, judicial, and implementation documents, interpreted alongside 28 scholarly sources, most of them peer-reviewed. The analysis combines a child- rights benchmark with relational vulnerability, Ubuntu ethics, institutional bricolage, and assemblage theory. Four findings emerge. First, continental standards are substantially more child-specific than the SADC mobility regime, whose central protocol was still not in force in August 2026. Second, documentation operates as an administrative switch that converts formally universal rights into conditional entitlements. Third, protection is sequence-dependent: outcomes vary according to whether a child first encounters immigration, police, education, social welfare, or community actors. Fourth, children exercise constrained agency and often rely on improvised community and non-governmental care, but such resilience can conceal the withdrawal of public responsibility. The resulting protection gap need not be intentionally designed; it is politically reproduced through a postcolonial assemblage of inherited border controls, sectoral mandates, discretionary practices, and under-resourced services. The article therefore recommends institutional subtraction as well as addition: remove documentary preconditions for essential services, absorb parallel procedures into one child-protection pathway, repurpose existing case-management tools, and retire duplicative committees and reporting lines. The contribution is to explain migrant-child vulnerability as a governance outcome rather than an intrinsic attribute and to specify reforms that simplify, rather than further layer, the protection apparatus.