Choose handwashing, choose health

October 15, 2014

 

The annual Global Handwashing Day (October 15) celebrations are occasions to emphasise the role of handwashing with soap in the prevention of common but potentially lethal diseases such as diarrhoea, and many countries around the world are holding activities to promote the practice.  Here we take a look at one initiative which is already proving successful in Myanmar:

UNICEF delivers aid to thousands of children and families in Kachin State

Yangon, Myanmar, 11 September 2013:  From 7 to 10 September, UNICEF joined the UN Led Cross Line Mission to provide humanitarian assistance in the non-government controlled conflict-affected areas in Kachin State to deliver aid to thousands of children and families.

Starting from Kachin state capital Myitkyina, the Mission had to cross rough terrain through heavy rain and extreme weather to reach remote locations. Nearly 16,000 people in four IDP camps in Laiza: Woi Chyai Dabang, Je Yang, No 3 Market; Hpun Lum Yang and a Boarding school hosting IDP students in Momauk township, were reached with 11-truck load of supplies. IDPs in these camps will receive further humanitarian assistance. UNICEF staff also conducted brief health awareness sessions and explained the use of distributed items.

UNICEF has provided supplies in Wash, Health and Nutrition, and Education that reached an estimated 5,500 children and their families. Woi Chyai camp alone has over 1500 children under the age of 15.

Five UNICEF staff have also participated in rapid needs assessment to better plan and organize further critical support.

“UNICEF views this convoy as much more than the delivery of humanitarian assistance. It’s about bringing hope, trust, peace and international community support to the children, families and communities of Kachin. It’s about upholding human rights, including children’s rights, enhancing development outcomes and ensuring a brighter, peaceful future for all children and their families,” said Bertrand Bainvel, UNICEF Representative in Yangon, "It is high time normalcy was restored to the lives of children in Kachin.”

UN Led Cross Line Mission to conflict affected areas of Myanmar’s Kachin state is organized under the aegis of UN OCHA and in cooperation with other UN agencies and partners.

Since the beginning of the conflict in 2011, cross-line missions were conducted to border areas, covering only approximately 20 per cent (some 10,000 IDPs) of the total caseload in areas beyond Government control. Full and sustained access to all displaced locations is essential to provide assistance to all people in need.

ENDS//

UNICEF supported Non-Formal Primary Education (NFPE) offers second chance education for out-of-school children in Mon State

© UNICEF Myamar/2013/Myo Thame
Thar Thar Aung in the NFPE class in NO (2) Basic Primary School, Kyauktan Ward in Mawlamyaing

 

By Ye Lwin

 

Mawlamyaing, Mon State, Myanmar, 29 July 2013:  Thar Thar Aung 13, is happy to have his dream come true.  As a school drop-out he had little hope for a second chance until he got back on track with his primary education through Non Formal Primary Education (NFPE) programme.

UNICEF extends ECD programme to children in remote areas of Kayin State

 

© UNICEF Myamar/2013/MyoThame
Four year old Su Yadana and her mother Saw Nwe at the ECD centre at Kawtbaw Post Primary School. Su Yadana enjoys reading books provided by UNICEF

By Ye Lwin

 

Kawkareik, Kayin State,  17 July, 2013:Saw Nwe, mother of four year old Su Yadana from Kawtbaw village is proud of her daughter who attends the UNICEF supported Early Childhood Development (ECD) centre with her friends.

© UNICEF Myanmar/2013/Myo Thame
Ms. Miriam prepares Tha-Nakh-Kha (a traditional skin enhancing sun block) for Mee Mee* during her home visit to a family in Monywa. Mee Mee*6, lost both parents due to HIV and is taken care of by her grandparents
 

By Sandar Linn

 

MONYWA, Myanmar, 8 July 2013: UNICEF Regional Ambassador for East Asia and Pacific Region and popular Hong Kong actor-singer Miriam Yeung visited Myanmar in the first week of July, promoting Prevention of Mother to Child Transmission of HIV (PMCT) in Myanmar for UNICEF and partners. 

ျမန္မာ့အသံႏွင့္ရုပ္ျမင္သံၾကားႏွင့္ အက္(ဖ္)အမ္ ေရဒီယိုလိုင္းမ်ား ယူနီဆက္၊ က်န္းမာေရး၀န္ႀကီးဌာနႏွင့္ ပူးေပါင္းမည့္ အစီအစဥ္မ်ားထုတ္လႊင့္ေရး လက္မွတ္ေရးထိုး

ေနျပည္ေတာ္၊ မတ္လ ၂၁ရက္၊ ၂၀၁၂ ခုႏွစ္ ။        ။ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံရွိ ကေလးသူငယ္မ်ား ရွင္သန္ဖြံ႕ၿဖိဳးေရး ကာကြယ္ေစာင့္ေရွာက္ေရးအတြက္ သင့္ေတာ္သည့္ အျပဳအမူအေလ့အက်င့္မ်ားႏွင့္ ဗဟုသုတမ်ား ပိုမိုနားလည္သေဘာေပါက္လာေစရန္အတြက္ ျမန္မာ့ ေရဒီယိုႏွင့္ အက္(ဖ္)အမ္လိုင္းမ်ားတြင္ ယူနီဆက္ႏွင့္ က်န္းမာေရး၀န္ႀကီးဌာနမွ ပူးေပါင္းတင္ဆက္သည့္ ေရဒီယိုအစီအစဥ္မ်ား ထုတ္လႊင့္ႏိုင္ေရး လုပ္ငန္းအစီအစဥ္ လက္မွတ္ေရးထိုးပြဲကို မတ္လ ၂၁ရက္ေန႔တြင္ ေနျပည္ေတာ္၌ က်င္းပခဲ့သည္။

အေသးစိတ္ဖတ္ရႈလိုလွ်င္

http://www.unicef.org/myanmar/media_20694.html သို႔ ၀င္ေရာက္ေလ့လာ၍ အဂၤလိပ္၊ ျမန္မာႏွစ္ဘာသာျဖင့္ ဖတ္ရႈေလ့လာႏိုင္ပါသည္။

Comprehensive Education Sector Review in Myanmar Sets the Path for Improving Quality of Education

©UNICEF Myanmar/2009/Zaw Zaw Tun

Myanmar, 8 November 2012: The Government of the Republic of the Union of Myanmar together with development partners officially launched a Comprehensive Education Sector Review (CESR) in the Myanmar capital Nay Pyi Taw on 23 October 2012.  The launching ceremony was chaired by the Deputy Minister of Education H.E Dr. Myo Myint and co-chaired by UNICEF Representative Mr Ramesh Shrestha and Mr Chris Elstoft, Assistant Director General of AusAID’s Mekong, Philippine, Myanmar and Regional Branch. 

Myanmar Launches New Vaccine to Strengthen Combat Against Major Childhood Illnesses

Nay Pyi Taw, Myanmar, 6 November 2012: In a landmark move to improve child health, Myanmar’s Ministry of Health today officially introduced a new vaccine to protect children against five potentially life-threatening diseases.  Introduction of the Penta valent vaccine marks a milestone in Myanmar’s child immunization. It was announced in a ceremony hosted by the Ministry of Health with WHO and UNICEF.

The inaugural of the Penta valent vaccine was presided by the Minister of Health H. E. Dr. Phe Thet Khin. WHO Representative Dr. Herbert Tennakoon and UNICEF Myanmar Chief of Health Dr. Marinus Gotink and Mr. Dagfinn Hoybraten, Chairman of the Board for GAVI, also spoke at the event.

The introduction of the new vaccine records an important stride in terms of Myanmar Government’s commitment to combat vaccine preventable diseases through co-financing of the vaccines to the amount of US$ 5 million over the next 5 years.

By combining Diphtheria, Pertussis, Tetanus, Hepatitis B and Hib vaccines, Penta valent helps prevent five infections more effectively among children under five years of age. The Haemophilus influenzae type b vaccine is an important addition to strengthen routine immunization and to improve child health. Children of Myanmar would now be protected against by five antigens with a single shot during routine immunization.

This will not only have a positive impact on child health, but would also save families the costs for health care; also save time and labour of health workers that can contribute to more effective and systematic management of the Myanmar immunization programme.

 

Penta valent vaccine is made available to the children of Myanmar with the support of GAVI Alliance, a Geneva-based public-private partnership that helps improve health in the world’s poorest countries. The introduction of new vaccine is through the partnership between the Government of Myanmar, WHO, UNICEF and the GAVI Alliance and other partners and civil society.

Myanmar now joins the list of 179 countries where Haemophilus influenzae type b has become part of national immunization schedules. Haemophilus influenzae type b (Hib) remains a leading cause of childhood bacterial meningitis and pneumonia, and can cause other serious infections for which children aged between 4 to 18 months are most at risk.