Off the fields and back to school

by Tin Htet Paing

KAYAH, MYANMAR - Cecilia doesn’t want her father to come back from the rehabilitation centre if he still hates her for studying. “Just study and don’t eat!” he would drunkenly tell her each time he found her studying at home. 

CECILIA, 18, WORKS ON A GROUP EXCERCISE WITH HER CLASSMATES DURING THE AFTERNOON NFMSE CLASS AT BEHS LOILIN LAY, IN LOILIN LAY, LOIKAW
 ©UNICEF Myanmar/2019/Min Zayar Oo

“I don’t want to be like my father,” said the 18-year-old Karenni girl, almost unapologetically, as she sat inside her classroom at a school just outside of Loikaw in Myanmar’s eastern state of Kayah. “I want to become an educated parent who can show her children the right way,” she explained. 

Overcoming the challenges to survive - the story of baby Chit Htun

In Myanmar, prematurity is a leading cause of death in the first year and the Ayeyarwady region records the highest levels of neonatal mortality nationally.

Maternal malnutrition, poverty, lack of health education and a lack of access to antenatal care make the early stages of life very difficult, particularly in rural areas. In many cases hypothermia, a leading cause of infant death often goes unrecognised and untreated, likewise, low blood sugar (hypoglycaemia) and a low level of oxygen (hypoxia).

©2018/Myaung Mya Paediatric Team

For those who are admitted to neonatal units malnutrition is a problem. There are often delays feeding and supportive feeding approaches such as nasogastric (NG) feeding are not routine. Units experience nursing and medical shortages and staff change department frequently which means staff often find it difficult to practice in the most effective way.

The limited number of working incubators, monitoring equipment, infusion pumps, and laboratory facilities, combined with power cuts, overcrowding of hospital wards mean babies face daily challenges. Infection control management is difficult across all areas of hospital care for babies and children.

It takes a village…

When children live in conflict affected areas or in camps for the Internally Displaced Persons (IDP), their education will be one of the first things to be compromised. But when communities and local officials realize the future of those vulnerable children can be brighter through education, then it will be possible to keep children learning even in difficult circumstances.  

Grade 4 IDP children, originally from Zup Mai Yan village of Ingyanyan Township, learning Geography at Tang Hpre IDP camp, Kachin State on 15 November 2018.
©UNICEF Myanmar/2018/ Nyan Zay Htet

By Fre Yilma

In Kachin State, following the conflict in April 2018, children from villages in Njang Yang Township, including students and teachers from Zup Mai Yang village, took shelter in Tang Hpre IDP camp. Initially, the children were not able to start the 2018-2019 academic year. However, with the collaboration of the local community, State Parliamentarians and district education authorities children like Hkun Mai are now able to learn within the camp.

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.