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//

‘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 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. 

UNICEF-supported community volunteer training and prevention activities help control malaria in high risk areas

© UNICEF Myanmar/2011/Thet Wai Hlaing
Lwe Zar Thin working on her malaria prevention plan

By Dr. Thet Wai Hlaing

Kyaikhto Township, Mon State, Myanmar, 19 June 2013: Lwe Zar Thin, 45, is one of the health volunteers who received five-day intensive training on prevention and treatment of malaria in Thit Seint Kone village, which used be to a malaria high risk area in Mon State.

Lwe Zar Thin is a mother of two children, has long experience as an auxiliary midwife since 1989. She lives and works in the Thit Seint Kone village, with 58 households and 287 villagers. The village was infamous in Mon state for its high prevalence, high risk malaria status with an 1a ranking according to malaria micro-stratification.
  
She is happy that her work is contributing to fighting and reducing malaria deaths and malaria risk status in her village has improved from high to low. Malaria micro-stratification report 2013 declares Thit Seint Kone village as a malaria death free village.

“I had a five-day community volunteer training on how to prevent and treat malaria; I also received three days’ refresher training course three months later,” Lwe Zar Thin said.

Following the training, in October 2011, she committed to work as a volunteer to fight against malaria in her community. Now there are 25 malaria volunteers working in the village.

“All 25 volunteers from Thit Seint Kone village joined this five day training, which gave them a grasp of effectively prevention of malaria outbreak in high risk areas,” said Dr. Thet Wai Hlaing, Regional Programme Officer from UNICEF office in Mawlamyaing, the capital of Mon State.

Majority of villagers are living on rubber plantation, or in growing ground nut, sesame and paddy. Some work in the Myawaddy Trading Zone along Myanmar-Thai border or in the gold mines in the nearby areas. 

Midwives make monthly supervisory visits to support trained volunteers. Township and state level officials also make quarterly visits to the villages to monitor, support and improve malaria prevention activities as necessarily.

Every febrile case from her village consults Lwe Zar, and she helps them get malaria test and appropriate treatment.  On an average she handles 10 to15 malaria patients every month. “We are use rapid diagnostic test kits and anti-malaria drugs,” said Lwe Zar Thin.

Every month she finds at least one to three malaria parasite cases from those who are working in the gold mines and migrant workers working along Thai-Myanmar border. “Fortunately, the number of malaria cases in my village is dropping,” added Lwe Zar, “In spite of my years of experience as auxiliary midwife, I gained knowledge and confidence in dealing with malaria patients after receiving the UNICEF-supported intensive training and having worked as a malaria volunteer.”
 
She feels that people in her village rely on her and appreciate her help. This job is not for generating a big income, but she feels much passionate for the work she is doing.
 
Malaria is one of the four major diseases responsible for under-5 child mortality in Myanmar. Some 284 out of 330 townships in Myanmar are malaria endemic and about 60 per cent of malaria cases are reported from forest areas.

Sanitation facilities at school encourage children to expand demand for healthier environment to home and community

© UNICEF Myanmar/2013/Myo Thame 
New latrines Kadauksa Primary School also has hand washing facilities; two for girls and two for boys

By Sandar Linn

PANTANAW, 14 June 2013 – Villagers in Kadauksa accepted diarrhoea as a common illness not linking it to poor sanitation and hygiene conditions.

The State of the World’s Children 2013 report launched in Yangon’s Aung San Stadium with sports and joyous participation of a hundred children

 

Including children with disabilities not only benefit them but enriches everyone in the society

 

By Zafrin Chowdhury

YANGON, Myanmar 14 JUNE 2013 – UNICEF’s global flagship report State of the World’s Children 2013 on children with disabilities was launched in Aung San Stadium today amidst joyous participation of a hundred children along with distinguished speakers and advocates calling for equitable rights and opportunities for children with disabilities.

Upcoming Myanmar National Launch of the State of the World’s Children Report

UNICEF Myanmar is pleased to announce the national launch of UNICEF’s global annual flagship publication the State of the World’s Children 2013 Report this week in the Aung San Stadium.

UNICEF congratulates millions of children of Myanmar and their families on their back-to-school day

© UNICEF MYANMAR/2009/Zaw Zaw Tun

Yangon, Myanmar, 3 June 2013:  UNICEF congratulates the 5.25 million children in Myanmar, along with their parents and teachers, who have returned to primary schools today, 1.25 million of whom are entering the first grade for the first time.

Working Together in Strengthening Immunization and Health Systems in Myanmar

Yangon, Myanmar, 4 April 2013: The first round of polio immunization campaign aiming to cover 370,000 under five children was carried out from 26 to 30 April 2013 in 12 conflicts affected Townships in Rakhine State.

ျ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။

A stitch in time: street children learn a trade

Thanda sews a shirt during a vocational training session
© UNICEF Myanmar/2012/Andy Brown

Sixteen-year-old Thanda* has spent much of her life living and working on the streets of Yangon, capital of Myanmar. She is a small, serious teenager in a blue polo shirt and traditional longyi skirt. Thanda’s father is a manual labourer and her mother is a washer woman. She has seven siblings. When the family earns enough, they live in bamboo hut outside town. But other times they can’t afford the rent and have to live on the streets.

Joint UN Executive Board’s Visit to Myanmar Aim Stronger Engagement between the UN and Myanmar

Ms. Kadra Ahmed Hassan takes time with Pa O ethnic children at Nang Tang Rual Health Centre, Nang Tang village, Kalaw Township during the Joint UN Executive Board Visit to Shan State

Taungyi, Southern Shan State, Myanmar 16 March 2013: Myanmar’s rapid and exciting transition has not escaped the attention of the Executive Board of the six United Nations Agencies working in Myanmar, namely UNICEF, UNFPA, UNDP, WFP, UN Women and UNOPS. The Boards of all six agencies have chosen Myanmar for their annual joint field visit this year to actively engage with the country’s government and people in a few different remote locations.