Vietnam
Vietnam’s economic growth is so rapid that it’s close to achieving Millennium Development Goal 1 on poverty reduction. But the impressive statistics of trade and investment mask serious underlying challenges for children: HIV and AIDS, trafficking, poor education for ethnic minorities and increasingly fierce disasters.
The water came so quickly. Everyone shouted that we should run. So I took my children to the mountain.
Vu Thi Nguyet stands by the side of a foundation on which there is no house.
She, her children and her husband lost everything in the floods that struck their village, not once but twice in 2010.
Stories such as Nguyet’s are now common.
Cyclone Ketsana in 2009 was the worst in living memory and Cyclone Mirinae struck five weeks later; in 2010 the country suffered two floods.
The human and financial costs of increasingly severe and frequent disasters, due in part to climate change, are enormous.
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Vieng tries to calm her son Truong, two, in front of what remains of their home in Quang Tri province, which was hit by Cyclone Ketsana on 28 September 2009, causing the worst flooding in decades.
Other factors also hold Vietnam’s children back: poverty, HIV/AIDS, poor quality education, the second-class status of ethnic minority children.
What we’ve achieved
We’ve made huge strides in newborn and child health — reducing the neonatal mortality rate from 19.4% to 14.7% in one district and nearly halving it in another.
We're training doctors, midwives, nurses and village health workers, and providing nutritious food for children’s crucial first two years.
We treated 3,500 newborns in our new care units in 2010 and helped 600,000 children with our health and HIV programmes.
Our pilot curriculum for children whose first language is not Vietnamese has been adopted by all schools with ethnic minority children in 40 provinces — more than 1.5 million children benefit each year in grade one alone.
“Officials could see the difference,” wrote one of our education experts, “vibrant and happy children, delighted that they knew the answers, compared to tense, confused and silent children straining to understand when they’re taught in an language which is not their own.”
We helped reduce the proportion of underweight children, from 28.5% to 23.8% in one district in less than a year — evidence that, if it can be done in one district, it can be done nationwide.
We teach young people living on the street how to prevent the spread of HIV, and provide care and support for those who are HIV positive.
In a sign of how our work is recognised, a child from one of our projects was asked to speak at a Ministry of Health HIV conference.
“I would like everyone to stop the spread of HIV so that it doesn’t take away our beloved parents,” she told an audience of 1,500 top-level officials.
What’s urgent
The faster we respond to disasters, the more lives we save.
As climate change takes a greater toll, we need to make sure that more communities know how to cope with disaster.
We want more children to live to their fifth birthday.
We need to break the cycle of poverty in which malnourished mothers give birth to underweight children, who grow up unable to fulfil their potential.
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