Going blue for children in Myanmar

By Htet Htet Oo

Every year, 20th November, marks the day when the most widely ratified human rights treaty in history, the Convention on the Rights of the Child, was adopted. In Myanmar, this year, children and adolescents took centre stage making it a day ‘for children, by children’. From the capital, Nay Pyi Taw, to Mandalay Region and Rakhine State, children and adolescents urged adults to recognise their rights and to hear their concerns and aspirations. Here are some of the voices of children and adolescents that UNICEF and the Department of Social Welfare helped to elevate throughout the country.

U-Reporters at the Union Parliament singing 'We Are the World' in Burmese
©UNICEF Myanmar/2018/Nyan Zay Htet

Executive Directors and Board members from six UNICEF National Committees visit Myanmar

From 21-23 October 2018, Executive Directors and senior Board members from six UNICEF National Committees from the Czech Republic, Germany, Hungary, Netherlands, New Zealand, and Spain, visited UNICEF’s programmes in Myanmar to understand how UNICEF is supporting the Myanmar Government to meet the needs of children in the country. Their visit included both development and humanitarian programmes to understand first-hand what it means to be there for every child, no matter what their ethnicity, community, religion or language.

Executive Directors and Board Members of six UNICEF National Committees together with UNICEF Myanmar Representative and staff at U Thant (3^rd UN Secretary General) House Museum, Yangon Myanmar 

©UNICEF Myanmar/2018/Fre Yilma

ကေလးသူငယ္ေနေပ်ာ္ေက်ာင္းမ်ား၏ သင္တန္းမ်ားက ကၽြန္မ၏ သင္ျပမႈစြမ္းရည္မ်ားကို တိုးတက္ေစခဲ့

By Tin Shwe

ဘူးသီးေတာင္၊ ရခုိင္ျပည္နယ္၊ ၇ စက္တင္ဘာ ၂၀၁၈ -  ျဖဴေႏြမိုးသည္ ဘူးသီးေတာင္၊ အမွတ္(၂) အေျခခံပညာအထက္တန္းေက်ာင္းတြင္ ဒုတိယတန္း၊ လက္ေထာက္ဆရာမအေနျဖင့္ ဆယ္ႏွစ္ေက်ာ္ တာ၀န္ထမ္းေဆာင္ခဲ့သူ ျဖစ္သည္။

၂၀၁၈ ခုႏွစ္မတုိင္မီထိ ျဖဴသည္ ဆရာ၊ဆရာမမ်ားကို အဓိကထားေသာ နည္းလမ္းျဖင့္သင္ၾကားပုိ႔ခ်ခဲ့ၿပီး ဆရာမတစ္ဦးအေနျဖင့္ သူမကိုသူမ ပုိမိုအဓိကထားေသာ ေဆာင္ရြက္ခ်က္မ်ားေပၚတြင္ အာရံုစိုက္ခဲ့သည္။ သုိ႔ေသာ္လည္း ယခုႏွစ္တြင္ သူမအတန္းအတြက္ ပညာေရး၀န္ႀကီးဌာနက သင္ရိုးသစ္ကုိ စတင္ မိတ္ဆက္လိုက္ေသာအခါ သူမသည္ ျခားနားခ်က္ကုိသတိျပဳခဲ့မိသည္။ သင္ရိုးသစ္တြင္ ဆရာ၊ ဆရာမမ်ားက အတန္းသင္ခန္းစာမ်ားႏွင့္ သင္ၾကားမႈပစၥည္းမ်ား ျပင္ဆင္ရာတြင္လည္းေကာင္း၊ အတန္း ေလ့က်င့္ခန္းမ်ားတြင္ တပည့္မ်ား တက္ၾကြစြာပူးေပါင္းပါ၀င္မႈတြင္လည္းေကာင္း ေတာင္းဆိုမႈမ်ား မ်ားျပားလာသည္။ 

 စီအက္ဖ္အက္စ္နည္းလမ္းကိုသံုး၍ ဒုတိယတန္းေက်ာင္းသားမ်ားအား ဆရာမ ျဖဴေႏြမိုးမွ သင္ၾကားေနပံု
©UNICEF Myanmar/2018/Tin Shwe

ဂ်ပန္အစိုးရ၏အေထာက္အပံ့ျဖင့္ ယူနီဆက္ဖ္က ကူညီပံ့ပိုးေသာ အေျခခံပညာဦးစီးဌာနက ဖြင့္လွစ္သည့္ ကေလးေပ်ာ္ေက်ာင္းမ်ား(စီအက္ဖ္အက္စ္)သည္ သင္ရိုးသစ္သုိ႔ေျပာင္းလဲျခင္းျဖင့္  ဆရာ/ဆရာမမ်ားကို ကူညီရန္ ရည္ရြယ္သည္။ ဘာသာစကား ကံုလံုၾကြယ္၀ေရးအစီအစဥ္ႏွင့္ ေပါင္းစပ္ထားေသာ ဤသင္တန္းက မိခင္ ဘာသာစကားသည္ ျမန္မာစကားမဟုတ္ေသာ ကေလးမ်ားကို ပုိမုိ အေထာက္အကူျဖစ္ေစရန္ ဆရာ/ဆရာမမ်ားကို ပံ့ပုိးကူညီေပးသည္။

Child Friendly Schools’ training greatly improved my teaching skills

By Tin Shwe

Buthidaung, Rakhine State, 7 September 2018 - Phyu Nway Moe is a Grade 2 Assistant Teacher who has worked at the Basic Education State High School (2) in Buthidaung for more than 10 years. 

Up until 2018, Phyu taught a ‘teacher-centred’ method in her class, focusing activities more on her as the teacher. However, when the Ministry of Education introduced a new curriculum for her class this year, she noticed a difference in which the new curriculum increases demands on both teachers, in the preparation of classes and teaching materials, and pupils, in their active participation in class exercises.

Phyu Nway Moe teaching her her Grade 2 students using the CFS method 

©UNICEF Myanmar/2018/Tin Shwe

The Child Friendly Schools (CFS), provided by the Department of Basic Education with support from UNICEF through the funding from the Government of Japan, is aimed to help teachers through this transition to the new curriculum. The training is also combined with the Language Enrichment programme, to help teachers working with children whose mother tongue is not Myanmar.

On World Cleanup Day, UNICEF Sittwe Office organizes environmental action for children

By Chris Schuepp

SITTWE, RAKHINE STATE, 15 September 2018 - The UNICEF Field Office in Sittwe, Rakhine State, organized a significant clean-up of the local beach on World Cleanup Day 2018. More than 300 participants from UNICEF, people in the local community and international partners in Sittwe and came together during the weekend to clean a six kilometre stretch of beach in the capital of Rakhine State.

“Supporting the provision of clean and safe areas for children is one of our priorities. We set a sign by inviting our partners and the community in Sittwe to join us on World Clean-up Day and translate our words into action together,” said Mandie Alexander, Chief of Field Office for UNICEF in Sittwe. “We are grateful for the support from the local municipality in the proper disposal of the garbage we collected on the beach.”

မိခင္ႏွင့္ကေလးျပဳစုေစာင့္ေရွာက္မႈ အသိပညာမ်ားေပးျခင္းျဖင့္ ရွမ္းျပည္နယ္၊ ေက်းလက္ေဒသမ်ားရွိ ကေလးသူငယ္မ်ားထံ ေရာက္ရွိျခင္း

*အလက္စ္ဇႏၵာ၀င္းေရးသာသည္

မဂ်ီးဆိပ္၊ ရွမ္းျပည္နယ္ - ရွမ္းျပည္နယ္၊ ေတာင္ႀကီးၿမိဳ႕ကို မိခင္နွင့္ကေလးက်န္းမာေရး ျပႆနာဆုိင္ရာ အခ်က္အလက္ေတြေကာက္ယူဖုိ႔ ခရီးသြားခဲ့တဲ့ ယူနီဆက္ဖ္အဖြဲ႕၀င္တစ္ေယာက္အေနျဖင့္ ကၽြန္ေတာ့္ရဲ႕ အဓိကတာ၀န္ကေတာ့ ေဒသဆိုင္ရာ က်န္းမာေရးအဖြဲ႕မ်ား၊ မိခင္မ်ားနွင့္ ကေလးမ်ားကို ေတြ႔ဆံု ေမးျမန္းျခင္းျဖစ္ပါတယ္။ ေတာင္ႀကီးကေန အင္းေလးကန္ကို တစ္နာရီၾကာ ကားနဲ႔သြားေရာက္ၿပီး ေနာက္ထပ္ မိနစ္ေလးဆယ္ ေလွစီးၿပီးတဲ့အခါမွာေတာ့ ကၽြန္ေတာ္တုိ႔အဖြဲ႕ဟာ မဂ်ီးဆိပ္လို႔ေခၚတဲ့ ရြာေလးမွာရွိတဲ့ ယူနီဆက္ဖ္က ေထာက္ပံ့ထားတဲ့ အစိုးရက်န္းမာေရးေဆးခန္းကို ေရာက္ရွိခဲ့ပါတယ္။

The local health team standing outside the health office receiving UNICEF health team in Magyi Seik village, Shan State.
©UNICEF Myanmar/2018/Alexander Win

Reaching children in rural areas of Shan State by providing maternal and child care knowledge

By Alexander Win*

MAGYI SEIK, SHAN STATE - As a member of the team from UNICEF that travelled to Taunggyi Town in Shan State, for data collection on issues of maternal and child health in the area, my main role was to interview local health teams, mothers and children.  After an hour of driving towards Inle Lake from Taunggyi and after forty minutes of boat ride, our team finally reached a government health facility supported by UNICEF located in a village called Magyi Seik.

The local health team standing outside the health office receiving UNICEF health team in Magyi Seik village, Shan State.
©UNICEF Myanmar/2018/Alexander Win