Ethnic minority communenities in Vietnam

Life in remote, ethnic minority communenities in Vietnam can be a struggle to survive. The difficulties in the lives of ethnic minorities are many fold: child malnutrition, no year round access to clean water, a general lack of hygienic latrines, lack of information and language difficulties which result in lesser opportunities, poor quality of education and health care.

Although the efforts by the Vietnamese government to alleviate poverty have been recommendable, still pockets of poverty, especially in ethnic minority areas, remain.

In order to help the Government, the EC together with the Non-Governmental Organisations ‘Enfants et Developpement' and ‘Save the Children UK', joined the efforts of local communities and teachers to develop a child friendly community and to alleviate poverty in two districts in Lao Cai and Quang Ninh province respectively in the North of Vietnam.

Before the project started in 2003, still a large number of school-age children, especially girls, were out of school in these districts. Moreover, less than half of the kindergarten-age children were attending kindergarten, most women were illiterate and could not speak Vietnamese, out-of-school children were forced to work long hours in the fields, often in cold and unhygienic conditions, informal and extra-curricular education was also very limited and children had very few safe place to play.