Vietnam

Becoming a market economy has brought many benefits to Vietnam but the gap between rich and poor continues to widen. We’re fighting for the rights of children who aren’t benefiting from Vietnam’s quick economic and social changes.

  • We’re ensuring as many children as possible get a free primary education.
  • Over 2 million children benefited from our education work last year.
  • We’re working to reduce the under-five mortality rate two thirds by 2015.
  • We’re teaching young people how to protect themselves from AIDS.

Save the Children in Vietnam

Since we first opened a Vietnam office in Hanoi in 1990 we’ve been working with children and communities from both majority and minority ethnic backgrounds. Young people are helping us shape and run all our projects.

We’re helping minority ethnic children get a better education

About 95% of Vietnamese children enrol in primary school but many of them still don’t get a good education, particularly children who are poor and from a minority ethnic group.

Building on our successful bilingual education pilot project, we’ve developed teaching and learning materials and assessment tools that are now used in all schools with children from minority ethnic groups — that’s more than 1.5 million grade 1 children annually.

We’re helping children protect themselves from HIV and AIDS

We want all young people under 18 to have the knowledge and skills to protect themselves from HIV. We trained 365 peer educators to talk to students about HIV and how to avoid it. We’ve also recruited 127 adult volunteers to work with children either infected or affected by HIV and AIDS.

We’re protecting children from harm

Child trafficking is a serious problem in Vietnam. We’ve set up child protection committees that help children protect themselves from trafficking and unsafe migration.

We’re getting children out of poverty

One in three children in Vietnam still lives in poverty. We’re showing policy-makers how they can improve the quality of children's lives by taking part in Young Lives, a 15-year international research project into child poverty.

Emergencies

Vietnam is classified as the fifth most at-risk country in the world and over the past few years has had more than its usual number of typhoons and floods.

We’ve set up several projects in high-risk areas aimed at preparing for and responding to natural disasters. We’ve instructed trainers on search and rescue teams who’ve then gone on to train local people.

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