Building the relations with parliamentarians for children in Kachin: Champions for children’s rights

For the first time ever, UNICEF Myanmar organised a three day workshop with Kachin state Parliament, aiming at strengthening the relationship with the parliamentarians and to advocate for children’s rights. The first part of the workshop focussed on the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), specific child rights concerns in Kachin and Parliament’s role as champions for children’s rights. UNICEF’s Child Protection Team then zoomed in on one key concern for children in Kachin - Mine Action Awareness.

ကခ်င္ျပည္နယ္ရွိ ကေလးငယ္မ်ားအတြက္ လႊတ္ေတာ္အဖြဲ႕ဝင္မ်ားႏွင့္ ဆက္ဆံေရး တည္ေဆာက္ျခင္း - ကေလးသူငယ္အခြင့္အေရးအတြက္ ရပ္တည္ကာကြယ္သူမ်ား

ပထမဆုံးအႀကိမ္အျဖစ္ ယူနီဆက္ဖ္ျမန္မာက ကခ်င္ျပည္နယ္ လႊတ္ေတာ္အဖြဲ႕ႏွင့္ ၃ ရက္ အလုပ္႐ံုေဆြးေႏြးပြဲ ျပဳလုပ္ခဲ့သည္။ ရည္ရြယ္ခ်က္မွာ လႊတ္ေတာ္အဖြဲ႕ဝင္မ်ားႏွင့္ ဆက္ဆံေရး ေကာင္းမြန္ေစရန္ႏွင့္ ကေလးသူငယ္အခြင့္အေရးအတြက္ ေျပာၾကားေပးရန္ ျဖစ္သည္။ အလုပ္႐ံုေဆြးေႏြးပြဲ ပထမပိုင္းတြင္ ကေလးသူငယ္အခြင့္အေရးဆုိင္ရာ ကုလသမဂၢညီလာခံ (CRC)၊ ကခ်င္ျပည္နယ္ရွိ ကေလးသူငယ္အခြင့္အေရးဆုိင္ရာ အဓိက စိုးရိမ္စရာမ်ားႏွင့္ ကေလးသူငယ္ အခြင့္အေရးအတြက္ ရည္တည္ကာကြယ္သူမ်ားအျဖစ္ လႊတ္ေတာ္၏ အခန္းက႑တုိ႔ကို အဓိကထားေဆြးေႏြးခဲ့သည္။ ထုိ႔ေနာက္ ယူနီဆက္ဖ္၏ ကေလးသူငယ္ ကာကြယ္ေစာင့္ေရွာက္ေရးအဖြဲ႕က ကခ်င္ျပည္နယ္တြင္ ကေလးမ်ားအတြက္ အဓိက စိုးရိမ္စရာတစ္ခုျဖစ္ေသာ မိုင္းအႏၱရာယ္သတိျပဳမႈေရးနဲ႔ ပတ္သက္ၿပီး ေျပာဆုိခဲ့သည္။

My commitment to help children in hard to reach areas (Naga Self-Administrative Region)

By Nay Myo Thu, Health Officer, UNICEF Myanmar 

I was part of the seven-member response team that travel to Lahe Township, in Naga Self-administrative Region, after a measles outbreak was confirmed. We took a flight from Mandalay to Khamti, a remote town in Sagaing Region. Then, we crossed Chindwin river by a small boat to reach Sin Thay village. From there,  we took a jeep to go the capital of Naga, Lahe. Fortunately,  the road was dry and we were able to reach our destination in 6 hours. When it rains, landslides are very common, blocking roads and making the journey much longer. Although the road is rough, bummpy and in some parts  very muddy,  we enjoyed the drive over the Naga hills, including the highest one - Htein Nyo mountain, which is over 5,000 ft high.

A child’s eye on Cyclone Komen

By Thiha Htun

 

Than Than Aye in her damaged home in Kha Ye Myaing Village, Maungdaw Township, Rakhine State
©UNICEF Myanmar/2015/Thiha Htun

Maungdaw Township, Rakhine State, Myanmar – 12 August 2015:  Ten-year-old Than Than Aye experienced first-hand the horrors of Cyclone Komen on 30 July and is living amongst the aftermath. The young student stays with her parents, two elder sisters and younger brother in Kha Ye Myaing village, Maungdaw Township, one of the hardest-hit by the strong winds and flooding. Many people in Than Than Aye’s village have lost their homes.

UNICEF calls on Parliamentarians to increase the budget for children

For the past two years, UNICEF has been discussing the opportunities for Myanmar to invest a greater part of its revenues into services for families and children, and in particular to the Social Protection Strategy. UNICEF wants to ensure that the most vulnerable families and children in Myanmar society are not by-passed by the current economic and social change.

 

In February 2015, UNICEF met with Parliamentarians to call for more investment in children now, for a brighter future for Myanmar. As Parliamentarians were discussing this year’s budget they had an important opportunity to take action and make the budget work for Myanmar’s children.

 

“It now all depends on policy makers, including the Parliamentarians, to make social protection a reality for millions of children and their families, from the 2015/2016 budget", said Bertrand Bainvel, UNICEF Representative to Myanmar.

 

"To build its future, Myanmar needs to invest right now in its people, starting with every child," concluded Bertrand Bainvel.

‘Seven things this year’ encourages mothers of young children to practice key health interventions

© UNICEF Myanmar/2013/Wendy Myint-Myint Hla
Nan Klé Klé (far right), Leader of ‘Seven Things This Year’ Initiative in Taung Tan Su Ward of Hpa-an Township and her seven-member core group with the wife of village Ward (far left)

by Wendy Myint-Myint Hla

Hpa-an, Kayin State, 24 July 2013 – “I now wash my hands with soap before eating” says Nan Klé Klé, 27 years old, a leader of ‘Seven Things This Year’ Initiative of Taung Tan Su Ward in Hpa-an Township.

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.