Vietnam
There are about 1.5 times more poor children than adults in Vietnam. Every third child still lives in poverty. Vietnam is under increasing threat from an HIV and AIDS epidemic.
- We're training young people to tell their friends how to avoid HIV and AIDS
- We’re making sure thousands of minority ethnic children get a good primary education
- We're helping 35,000 children protect themselves against trafficking and abuse
Save the Children in Vietnam
We first opened a Vietnam office in Hanoi in 1990. Today we work in the country’s north, centre and south, in cities and in the countryside. We work with children and communities from both majority and minority ethnic backgrounds.
Young people are helping us shape and run all our projects. We’re also working with the government and other organisations to build support for children’s rights.
We're helping minority ethnic children get a better education
Up to 98% of Vietnamese children enrol in school. But many of them still don’t get a good education, particularly children who are poor and from a minority ethnic group.
We work in two mountainous areas where many people from minority ethnic communities are living in deep poverty. We want to help all the children here — especially girls — complete primary school and continue with a lower secondary education. Our programme reached 8,829 minority ethnic children last year.
Learning in their mother tongue is key to getting minority ethnic children out of poverty. Last year, 391 preschool children benefited from our community-based bilingual education pilot project. We trained 111 preschool and 120 primary school trainers in how to teach second languages in ways that are engaging and interesting for children. Our preschool curriculum for minority ethnic children was formally introduced by the Ministry of Education and Training in 2007.
We're helping children protect themselves from HIV and AIDS
Care and support for children infected with or affected by HIV and AIDS has been a major focus for the programme in the past year. We reached a total of 87,153 children.
Training children to talk to their friends about HIV is very effective. Last year, our peer educators talked to more than 103,000 other young people about HIV and how to avoid it.
Over the past year, we helped 745 children infected with or affected by HIV and AIDS to stay in school by supplying them with textbooks, pens, paper or bicycles to get to school, or by paying their school fees.
We're protecting children from harm
During the past year, we’ve helped 35 trafficked Vietnamese children return to their families. We’ve provided counselling, paid for healthcare and given vocational training and support to develop small businesses. We’ve also supported training for more than 35,000 children and young people to give them the knowledge and skills to protect themselves from trafficking and unsafe migration.
We’re getting children out of poverty
Inequality is growing in Vietnam, and children are especially vulnerable to losing out.
We’re taking part in Young Lives, a 15-year international research project into child poverty in Vietnam, Ethiopia, India and Peru. We’ll use this information to show policy-makers how they can improve the quality of children's lives. Read more about Young Lives.
Find out more
- Download the full country brief (PDF 136KB).
- Read about our education programme in Vietnam.
