Breastfeeding: a winning goal for life

It’s now World Breastfeeding Week and UNICEF Laos and the Lao Government continue to promote the life-saving benefits of breastfeeding.

Simple but effective: Water taps in remote areas

Ms Bou and her grandson © UNICEF/Laos/2014/S.Nazer

A simple water tap can bring huge benefits to many people, especially for women and children in rural areas who are often burdened with the responsibility of collecting and carrying water each day. In Yang village, in the northern province of Luang Prabang, villagers spoke of how new water taps have helped change their everyday lives for the better.

Ms Bou, a grandmother of one who thinks she is around 50, sat with us in a dusty wooden village meeting hall to talk about how things have changed since she was young. As a young girl and later a mother, she recalls how tiring it was collecting water with children.

Creating Lao 'Superkids'

A mother feeds her child food with Superkid
 (c) UNICEF/Fitzgerald
 

A mining company, UNICEF and 4 million sachets of powder called Super Kid – see the link there? No, perhaps not the most obvious. But today marks a very special day with a new product launch in the southern city of Savannakhet, Laos that will keep Lao children healthier and happier, and that’s all down to a very special partnership.

The initiative aims to dramatically reduce aneamia and other nutrition issues affecting young children in three of Laos’s southern provinces by providing a powder full of vitamins and minerals to sprinkle over food. 

Innovating for water in schools

Carlos Vasquez reports on an innovative initiative bringing water to schools:

Providing water in schools for hand washing is as crucial in Lao PDR as many other initiatives to improve the lives of students. There are many far-reaching benefits linked to hand washing: fewer infectious diseases, fruitful results of existing school meal plans and healthier lives. This is why German development organisation GIZ and UNICEF have joined forces to test a new design to get clean water flowing into schools.

Coming together to #END Violence against Children

See what Saykoson Sanoubane, our communication officer, had to say about a recent creative workshop for UNICEF's #END Violence campaign which took place in Vientiane, Lao PDR:



A participant explains some group ideas

Ideas have the power to change, but finding that one idea that can inspire thousands, or even millions, to think differently is a big challenge. We began a process in Lao PDR to find this bright idea for a campaign to help stop violence against children, working with Government and civil society.

Like everywhere else in the world, violence against children is a real problem in Lao PDR where we recently discovered that three out of every four children experience a method of violent discipline. So our challenge was to find the idea that could help make people throughout the country understand that violence against children need not be the social norm and can and should be stopped.