EENET asia Newsletters : Third issue November 2006 Contents

Creating Child Friendly Communities in Mountainous Ethnic Minority Areas of Vietnam

Marc Wetz

Enfants & Développement (E&D), formerly Save the Children France, started implementation of a ‘Child Friendly Ethnic Communities Project’ in early 2004 with financial support from Novib (Oxfam Netherlands). This article will focus on the rationale and the process of creating Child Friendly Communities (CFC) and not on describing the activities implemented.

What is a CFC?
There is no standard or globally accepted definition for a Child Friendly Community - we understand it to be a community respecting and actively realising all the rights of all children, as declared in the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC). We could say that it is a community that looks at all aspects of the life of a child - the child as a whole.

What is a CFC Initiative?
Following the definition of a Child Friendly Community, it is clear that a CFC initiative needs to focus on the whole social environment of a child. It needs to work together with all social systems and agencies in coordinated initiatives targeting major areas like Health/Nutrition, Education, Protection and Participation using an inter-sectoral approach.

Why Creating a CFC Initiative?
The main reason is that working coordinated, using an inter-sectoral approach, working on an issue from different angles gives better result than working in one single sector. For example in order to achieve a change in hygiene practices, it is better not only to work with families and health authorities in the villages but also with teachers and schools. Looking from an education perspective, we cannot consider the school as an island with no links to the outside world. Although we have advocated for our Child Friendly Schools and Inclusive Education Initiatives to make links with the families and communities of the children, the activities are leaning on the initiatives of schools and education authorities. It would strengthen our activities if a parallel and coordinated initiative could be conducted by other child-rights providers to improve child-friendliness in families and communities, for instance in prevention of corporal punishment.

Implementation Area
E&D has been developing child-friendly-community models in mountainous and remote ethnic-minority-areas in Lao Cai province in northern Vietnam. The Hmong are the main ethnic group. The area is considered to be one of the poorest in Vietnam. It suffers from seasonal food shortages and the population has almost no access to information from the outside. The malnutrition rate for children under the age of 5 is 40%, the functional illiteracy rate (in Vietnamese) among women is 90% and the Grade 7 attendance rate is 35%.
In these remote areas, the social environment of children is limited to the school they visit, their family and community. Therefore the project has established two main intervention components: the Child Friendly School and the Child Friendly Village.

Child Friendly School
All education levels that are available in the area are included in the Child Friendly School (CFS) initiative: Pre-school, Primary and Secondary School. The interventions cover all the six dimensions of CFS (as postulated by UNICEF) and are divided into 4 main groups:

• Equal access to preschool and basic education, especially for girls
• Physical environment and school-based health service
• Psycho-social environment and children participation
• Education quality in terms of teaching methods, relevance and appropriateness

Child Friendly Village
The main targets of the Child Friendly Village intervention are to improve child-friendliness in terms of safety, hygiene and recreation, and to improve child-friendliness in terms of care, protection and participation. The interventions are divided into 4 main groups:

• Safe, healthy and hygienic living environment
• Child care and protection practices of parents and communities
• Appropriate recreational opportunities and facilities
• Life and livelihood training for adolescents

What Approach / Process are We Using?
To maximise the participation of stakeholders, the project implemented the following yearly process which enables them to become ‘owners’ of their own development process:

1. CRC Sensitization
As the CRC is the framework for Child Friendly Communities, it’s important that local partners, including children, have good understanding of ALL the rights of ALL children. It will ‘enlarge’ their views on what are the rights and needs of children. It can be done through specially designed events at the beginning of the project . It should not be a one-time activity but repeated through continuous reference to CRC in all project activities. Good experiences were made with child rights songs for smaller children, child rights dramas, using elder children as co-facilitator for the younger children in sensitization activities and in organizing child rights summer camps.

2. Setting criteria for child friendliness
It is very important not simply to adopt international or national criteria but to allow local partners to define their own. This is being done by the stakeholders in villages visualizing their Child Friendly School or Child Friendly Village, reflecting on the CRC and external criteria before deciding on a set of criteria relevant to their specific setting and situation. These criteria are revised at the beginning of every year to ensure that local partners continue to identify with them. Some examples of these ‘local criteria’ are that children have the opportunity to celebrate their indigenous culture, that teachers understand the culture of children and that they speak slowly with a soft voice and that good boarding facilities are available (for children in remote settlements).

3. Self assessment of the current level of child friendliness
After setting criteria, the local partners assess the level of child-friendliness in their school or village. Major short-coming are being identified and earmarked for the yearly action plans. Good experiences have been made when children and community members assess their own groups before presenting their results.

4. Yearly action plans
Action plans react directly to major short comings in child-friendliness and are the main part of the CFC initiative. They decide on most of the project activities, taking existing policies, programs and available local resources into account. High importance is given to activities where children and community members have an active role in their implementation. Good experiences have been made with earmarking two or three main priorities involving children and community members so that they are not neglected in the decision making process.

5. Implementation, monitoring and evaluation
As in all CFC activities, children and community members are equal and crucial partners. Action plans are not only implemented and monitored by local authorities or teachers, but also by children and community members. To facilitate this we made good experiences in letting them develop and implement their own projects and activities to improve child-friendliness and in developing appropriate monitoring checklists.

Additional Tips for the Implementation of Your Own Child Friendly Community Initiative

A series of publications and working documents are available on the Child Friendly Ethnic Community project.

Marc Wetz is the Country Representative of Enfants et Développement in Vietnam. He can be contacted on marcwetz@yahoo.com

EENET asia Newsletters : Third issue November 2006 Contents