SOCIAL GOOD: Help #Create The Future We Want For Children With #FindTheWords (and how to enter to win $100 gift card)

SOCIAL GOOD: Help #Create The Future We Want For Children With #FindTheWords (and how to enter to win $100 gift card)

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World Moms Blog is thrilled to be taking part in Save the Children‘s #FindTheWords campaign.   The campaign raises awareness over 30 days with 30 words to  emphasize that every child needs early education to thrive. The community of mothers that form World Moms Blog are committed to improving not just the lives of our own children, but of all children around the world.

Just by helping us spread the word by sharing on social media you will be entered to win a $100.00 gift card

CREATE

The inspiration word we were given by Save the Children for this post was “create.”

We believe in creating the world we want to live in, here, at World Moms Blog. When I was looking to find a one-stop-place to read about mothers in different cultures and countries back in 2010, I couldn’t find what I was looking for. So on a whim, I decided to create the site I wanted to follow, just for fun.

In turn, the web site led me to new corners of the globe for social good and to meet my fellow World Moms, raised awareness for global health programs for women and children, created various international journalistic opportunities and fellowships for our contributors, and connected many very different women whom, otherwise, may have never connected, but are so glad they did!

Today, World Moms Blog writes from over twenty different countries spanning the globe, yet, we’ve found that mothers from such diverse places all want the same things for their children: health, peace, education, and security. We all want to see our children thrive and grow to their full potential.

There is an incredible sense of pride in creating something, whether you are a child creating a “masterpiece” or a mom creating the family financial plan. In creating World Moms Blog, I have had the opportunity to see many of our contributors run wild with their passions across our pages and witness our editors build our behind-the-scenes in managing over 60 volunteer contributors. That’s creation gone wild, and I love it!

With the help of the women who were part of writing and/or later embraced our mission statement, our site has blossommed into a tight-knit, albeit, world-wide community where the contributors and readers alike are able to broaden their worlds and connect over continents…all through the conduit of motherhood.

The word create inspires all we stand for at World Moms Blog. Whether it is to create an opportunity for yourself or for others to thrive globally, to create the life you want to lead, or the world you want to live in.

And we admire the work of Save The Children in creating a safe, healthy space for the children who need it most. Kids are at our heartstrings! Here are some amazing facts about the challenges children face around the globe:  

  • The first years of life are critical in children’s development, shaping cognitive, social and language skills, as well as lifelong approaches to learning. Evidence shows that 85 percent of brain growth occurs in the first five years of life.

 

  • By age three, children from low-income homes hear on average 30 million fewer words than their peers, putting them 18 months cognitively behind his or her peers when they start school.

 

  • 65% of young kids in need have little or no access to books.  More than two-thirds of poverty-stricken households do not possess a single book developmentally appropriate for a child under five.

 

  • Parents who talk less with their children in an engaging and supportive way have kids who are less likely to develop their full intellectual potential than kids who hear a significant amount of child-directed speech.

 

  • Around the world, if all students in low-income countries acquire basic reading skills, 171 million people could be lifted out of poverty.

 

Help create the future we want for children with Save the Children’s #FindTheWords. Early education creates an environment for young minds to flourish all over the world.

Just by helping us spread the word by sharing on social media you will be entered to win a $100.00 gift card, here are the rules: 
To enter share our post via twitter or Facebook or Snap a picture anywhere you see the word “Create” out in the world (or what it means to you) then post it to Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram.
To officially participate, your contributions must be tagged with the proper hashtags
#FindTheWords
#Create
and don’t forget to tag @WorldMomsBlog so we know you are in the running to win!

(The more people who share our posts the better chance we have of winning an interview with actress Jennifer Garner! So what are you waiting for!?)

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This is an original post to World Moms Blog by founder, Jennifer Burden. 

Jennifer Burden

Jennifer Burden is the Founder and CEO of World Moms Network, an award winning website on global motherhood, culture, human rights and social good. World Moms Network writes from over 30 countries, has over 70 contributors and was listed by Forbes as one of the “Best 100 Websites for Women”, named a “must read” by The New York Times, and was recommended by The Times of India. She was also invited to Uganda to view UNICEF’s family health programs with Shot@Life and was previously named a “Global Influencer Fellow” and “Social Media Fellow” by the UN Foundation. Jennifer was invited to the White House twice, including as a nominated "Changemaker" for the State of the World Women Summit. She also participated in the One Campaign’s first AYA Summit on the topic of women and girl empowerment and organized and spoke on an international panel at the World Bank in Washington, DC on the importance of a universal education for all girls. Her writing has been featured by Baby Center, Huffington Post, ONE.org, the UN Foundation’s Shot@Life, and The Gates Foundation’s “Impatient Optimists.” She is currently a candidate in Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs in the Executive Masters of Public Affairs program, where she hopes to further her study of global policies affecting women and girls. Jennifer can be found on Twitter @JenniferBurden.

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SOCIAL GOOD: FashionABLE Women In Ethiopia

SOCIAL GOOD: FashionABLE Women In Ethiopia

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Twenty years ago Cherry had completed her university degree in business, but was still unemployed. Driving with her family one night past the prostitutes on the streets of Addis Ababa she and her family sparked a discussion that left her wondering about what separated her life from theirs. The street women who flashed them as they passed stayed in Cherry’s mind. She was an educated woman who could not find a job, how were these women supposed to find decent jobs if she couldn’t? She began going out at night to speak with the girls on the street and formed relationships that then became the foundation of  “Women At Risk”, an NGO providing rehabilitation and job skills training to provide the women with alternate opportunities.

Today “Women At Risk” partners with Ellilta Products where the gorgeous FashionAble scarves that  Nicole Melancon and I first heard of through the ONE Campaign are made.  We knew if we had the opportunity while in Ethiopia on our International Reporting Project #EthiopiaNewborns New Media Fellowship trip we would love to visit the facility ourselves.   Eden Genet Melke, Ellilta’s Business Development Manager was gracious enough to welcome us to the headquarters, show us around, and share the story of how it all began.  Forty to forty-six women a year now go through the program of six months of rehabilitation followed by six months of job training.  The program has had a 96% rehabilitation rate of women being able to leave behind their life on the streets and create a new future for themselves, and their children.

Cotton has been grown as a crop in Ethiopia as far back as Queen Sheba, and the history of rich textiles are woven into Ethiopian heritage. Initially the women in the program, most of whom are single mothers, were hesitant to learn weaving. In Ethiopia weaving has traditionally been a man’s trade. Most Ethiopian men in the southern region know how to weave, and the women customarily have done the spinning, but once the women saw their finished products with their names on them, (each scarf comes with a name tag signed by the woman who made it) their sense of pride in what they were able to create emerged.

Here is  how the process of transformation takes place

Raw Cotton

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Colorful Dye

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Dried In The Sun

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Spun

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Then Woven Into the Beautiful Creations They Become

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This is an original post written by Elizabeth Atalay of Documama for World Moms Blog

Elizabeth Atalay and Nicole Melancon were in Ethiopia with The International Reporting Project #EthiopiaNewborns New Media Fellowship reporting on newborn health.

Elizabeth Atalay

Elizabeth Atalay is a Digital Media Producer, Managing Editor at World Moms Network, and a Social Media Manager. She was a 2015 United Nations Foundation Social Good Fellow, and traveled to Ethiopia as an International Reporting Project New Media Fellow to report on newborn health in 2014. On her personal blog, Documama.org, she uses digital media as a new medium for her background as a documentarian. After having worked on Feature Films and Television series for FOX, NBC, MGM, Columbia Pictures, Warner Brothers, 20th Century Fox, and Castle Rock Pictures, she studied documentary filmmaking and anthropology earning a Masters degree in Media Studies from The New School in New York. Since becoming a Digital Media Producer she has worked on social media campaigns for non-profits such as Save The Children, WaterAid, ONE.org, UNICEF, United Nations Foundation, Edesia, World Pulse, American Heart Association, and The Gates Foundation. Her writing has also been featured on ONE.org, Johnson & Johnson’s BabyCenter.com, EnoughProject.org, GaviAlliance.org, and Worldmomsnetwork.com. Elizabeth has traveled to 70 countries around the world, most recently to Haiti with Artisan Business Network to visit artisans in partnership with Macy’s Heart of Haiti line, which provides sustainable income to Haitian artisans. Elizabeth lives in New England with her husband and four children.

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Field Report #EthiopiaNewborns: Mosebo Village Health Post

Field Report #EthiopiaNewborns: Mosebo Village Health Post

Elizabeth Atalay

We had just spent the night at the source of the Blue Nile River. Lake Tana sits in Bahir Dar, Ethiopia, and as our caravan of Land Cruisers wove through the countryside from Bahir Dar to Mosebo I took in deep gulping breaths of sweet fresh Ethiopian air. The lush colors of our surroundings looked to me like they had been enhanced in Photoshop in the way that everything seemed to pop.  How could I feel this emotional connection to place that was never mine? A place I had never been?

Though this is my first time in Ethiopia, the verdant landscape brought me back to other rural parts of Africa I’d traveled through in my youth, similar topographies that had stayed with me ever since.  This time I’d returned to the continent as a new media fellow with the International Reporting Project to report on newborn health. World Moms Blog Editor Nicole Melancon of ThirdEyeMom is a fellow on the trip as well, and last week wrote about our initial overview of maternal and newborn health in Ethiopia. Now we were heading to one of the villages housing a Health Post, which serves the local and surrounding population of approximately 3,500 people.

Photo by Elizabeth Atalay

Mosebo Village is part of Save The Children’s Saving Newborn Lives program, and as such is looked to as a model village in the Ethiopian Government’s plan to reduce maternal and newborn mortality.  Mosebo is a rural agrarian community that produces wheat, teff and corn.  There I met seven-year-old Zina whose mother, Mebrate was about to give birth.  Through our translator Mebrate estimated her age to be around 26, and told us that Zina was her first child. For economic reasons she and her husband had waited to have a second.  When she had Zina, Mebrate had gone to her parent’s home to give birth, as women in Ethiopia often do. It is estimated that 80% of Ethiopian mothers will give birth in their home, often without a trained health care attendant. Towards the end of Mebrate’s first pregnancy she went to live with her parents as her family instructed, until after the baby was born.  In that way her mother could help her deliver, could care for her and the baby, and feed her the traditional porridge after birth. Although there were no complications during her delivery, sadly, many young mothers giving birth at home are not as fortunate. The time period during and around birth are the most vulnerable for the lives of both the mothers and babies. The Saving Newborn Lives Program aims to reduce maternal and newborn mortality beginning with awareness programs and antenatal care on the local level at Health Posts like the one we visited in Mosebo.

Mosebo Health Post

The Mosebo Health Post and Health Extension Workers

We had met Tirgno and Fasika, the two Health Extension Workers at the Mosebo Health Post earlier that day as they showed us the two room interior, and explained their role in improving maternal and newborn health.  They work to raise awareness in the community about the importance of antenatal care, and the potential dangers of giving birth at home for both mother and child. Newborn health is interdependent with maternal health, and the most prevalent causes of newborn mortality, infection, Asphyxiation, pre-maturity or low birth weight, and diarrhea can often be avoided with proper care.   These days in Mosebo after receiving antenatal care at the Health Post women are then referred to the regional Health Center for deliveries.

Zina shyly smiled when we ask her how she felt about having a new sibling, she stood straight and tall listening intently as we asked her mother about the babies’ arrival.  When Mebrate goes into labor this time, with her second child, she will embark on the walk along rural dirt roads for around an hour to the nearest Health Center to give birth.

Elizabeth Atalay is reporting from Ethiopia as a fellow with the International Reporting Project (IRP). This is an original post written for World Moms Blog.

You can follow all IRP reports by World Moms Elizabeth Atalay & Nicole Melancon at #EthiopiaNewborns

Elizabeth Atalay

Elizabeth Atalay is a Digital Media Producer, Managing Editor at World Moms Network, and a Social Media Manager. She was a 2015 United Nations Foundation Social Good Fellow, and traveled to Ethiopia as an International Reporting Project New Media Fellow to report on newborn health in 2014. On her personal blog, Documama.org, she uses digital media as a new medium for her background as a documentarian. After having worked on Feature Films and Television series for FOX, NBC, MGM, Columbia Pictures, Warner Brothers, 20th Century Fox, and Castle Rock Pictures, she studied documentary filmmaking and anthropology earning a Masters degree in Media Studies from The New School in New York. Since becoming a Digital Media Producer she has worked on social media campaigns for non-profits such as Save The Children, WaterAid, ONE.org, UNICEF, United Nations Foundation, Edesia, World Pulse, American Heart Association, and The Gates Foundation. Her writing has also been featured on ONE.org, Johnson & Johnson’s BabyCenter.com, EnoughProject.org, GaviAlliance.org, and Worldmomsnetwork.com. Elizabeth has traveled to 70 countries around the world, most recently to Haiti with Artisan Business Network to visit artisans in partnership with Macy’s Heart of Haiti line, which provides sustainable income to Haitian artisans. Elizabeth lives in New England with her husband and four children.

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Field Report #EthiopiaNewborns: An Overview of Maternal, Newborn and Child Health in Ethiopia

Field Report #EthiopiaNewborns: An Overview of Maternal, Newborn and Child Health in Ethiopia

Nicole's IRP Ethiopia 1

Ethiopia, one of the poorest countries in Africa with a population of 90 million people, stunned the world by achieving the Millennium Development Goal #4 of reducing the mortality rates of children under age 5 by two-thirds well ahead of the 2015 deadline. In a country in which 95% of the population lives outside of an urban center in rural, remote and hard to reach areas and a shocking 80% of women birth at home without a midwife.  Health Extension Workers (HEW) have been the key ingredient to Ethiopia’s success. However, sadly the rate of newborn survival in Ethiopia has not shown nearly as much progress.

As an international reporting fellow with The International Reporting Project,  fellow World Moms Blog editor, Elizabeth Atalay, and I are in Ethiopia for the next two weeks reporting on newborn health. We will be meeting with a diverse variety of people around the country such as doctors, health officials, mothers, NGOs, midwives and health extension workers to learn about Ethiopia’s maternal, newborn and child health systems, policies and strategies for improving newborn health. Today we had a presentation on maternal, newborn and child health in Ethiopia given by Dr. Abeba Bekele, the Program Manager at Save the Children Ethiopia’s Saving Newborn Lives Program.

Dr. Abeba Bekele is a medical doctor by training yet after spending five years working in the field she saw firsthand some of the tragic problems with maternal care in her country.

Watching as a patient bled to death after delivery, and being unable to save this mother of six, was a turning point for Dr. Abeba. She decided to move to working in public health policy in hope of improving Ethiopia’s poor maternal and child health care system.

Over the years, Dr. Abeba has seen remarkable progress in some areas, but painfully slow progress in other areas in regards to maternal, newborn and child health.

  • Over the past 20 years, Ethiopia has reduced child deaths (for children under age 5) by more than two-thirds. In 1990, an estimated 204 children in every 1,000 in Ethiopia died before the age of five. Now that number is closer to 69 in every 1,000.
  • While 1- 59 months (i.e. 5 year) child mortality rate is declining 6.1% annually the neonatal rate (first 28 days of life) is only declining 2.4% annually.
  • Since the year 2000, Ethiopia has reduced its lifetime risk of maternal death from 1 in 24 to 1 in 67.

Although these figures are encouraging, there is also much work to be done in improving maternal, newborn and child health in Ethiopia. One of the main issues that is making maternal and newborn mortality rates difficult to tackle is the fact that over 80% of women in Ethiopia deliver at home with no trained help. These women give birth assisted by the community birth attendant, with a friend, a neighbor or even by themselves. The best way to save both maternal and newborn lives is to have women give birth assisted by a trained midwife at a health center. In fact the Ethiopian government is strongly encouraging all women to give birth at a health center but there are many obstacles in the way.

Nicole IRP Ethiopia 2

In an effort to improve maternal, newborn and child health, the Ethiopian government has implemented a massive effort of new policies and programs throughout the nation. The biggest success story has been the training and deploying of an army of 34,000 Health Extension Workers (HEW). Implemented in 2005, this massive effort has had remarkable success in saving lives through education, prevention of diseases, and provision of family health services. HEW’s live within the community and are trained and paid by the government to do home visits for an assigned population within their community. HEWs have been successful in cutting child under five deaths significantly as they can check and treat for the biggest child killers like diarrhea, pneumonia and malaria. However, HEWs are not trained as midwives, and can only advise a woman to give birth in a health center. This is an area that must be changed as giving birth by a trained professional in a health center would significantly reduce neonatal and maternal deaths.

Progress also needs to be made in the sheer accessibility and number of health centers. Today there are only 3,500 health centers in Ethiopia for 90 million people. More health centers and hospitals need to be built and more roads to reach the inaccessible areas. More midwives need to be trained and distributed throughout the country. According to the 2012 State of the World’s Midwives report, there is one midwife for every 18,000 people in Ethiopia whereas the World Health Organization recommends there should be one midwife per every 5,000 people in a given country. A lot of work needs to be done but the progress they have made in the past two decades is admirable.

Nicole Melancon is reporting from Ethiopia as a fellow with the International Reporting Project (IRP). This is an original post written for World Moms Blog.

You can follow all IRP reports by World Moms Elizabeth Atalay & Nicole Melancon at #EthiopiaNewborns

Nicole Melancon (USA)

Third Eye Mom is a stay-at-home mom living in Minneapolis, Minnesota with her two children Max (6) and Sophia (4). Her children keep her continually busy and she is constantly amazed by the imagination, energy and joy of life that they possess! A world wanderer at heart, she has also been fortunate to have visited over 30 countries by either traveling, working, studying or volunteering and she continues to keep on the traveling path. A graduate of French and International Relations from the University of Wisconsin Madison, where she met her husband Paul, she has always been a Midwest gal living in Minnesota, Wisconsin and Chicago. This adventurous mom loves to be outside doing anything athletic (hiking, running, biking, skiing, snowshoeing or simply enjoying nature), to travel and volunteer abroad, to write, and to spend time with her beloved family and friends. Her latest venture involves her dream to raise enough money on her own to build and open a brand-new school in rural Nepal, and to teach her children to live compassionately, open-minded lives that understand different cultures and the importance of giving back to those in need. Third Eye Mom believes strongly in the value of making a difference in the world, no matter how small it may be. If there is a will, there is a way, and that anything is possible (as long as you set your heart and mind to it!). Visit her on her blog, Thirdeyemom, where she writes about her travels and experiences in other lands!

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SOCIAL GOOD: Introducing Human Rights to My Children

SOCIAL GOOD: Introducing Human Rights to My Children

I’ve recently introduced a picture book into my family’s reading time called “I Have the Right to Be a Child” by Alain SerresWith beautiful simplicity, the book provides the author’s interpretation of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. The Convention includes things like rights to education, gender equality, nutrition, health care, free speech, freedom from child labor, safety, etc. For kids, the book is a conversation starter about human rights. We talked a lot about the question, “What are rights and what are privileges?” For adults, the book is a reminder that these concepts really are not that complicated. It may be complicated in the implementation of granting rights, but when the rights themselves are asserted in the simple language of the children the Convention seeks to protect, it all becomes much more clear.

This is probably the first time my kids saw human rights presented in a way that was meaningful to them. In American museums and text books, the right to vote for women and people of color seems faraway and a “done deal.” They don’t think of those rights as things we continually need to address here and in other countries. My children often help me advocate to give children in developing countries access to school and vaccines, but the language of “rights” isn’t always included in those kinds of discussions.

My youngest really latched on to the page that said,

I have the right to express myself completely freely, even if it doesn’t always please my dad, and to say exactly how I feel, even if it doesn’t always please my mom.”

We have a lively ongoing debate about how that plays out. If she has the right to express herself completely freely, how might that compete with my perceived right not to be disrespected in my own home or the rights of her other friends and family members?

It might be surprising to Americans to learn that while 194 states in the world have agreed to the Convention, the U.S. has not officially ratified it. In fact, every member of the United Nations except Somalia, the United States, and South Sudan are party to the Convention, having agreed to change or make laws and to develop practices and programs to support it. The U.S. has signed to show support, but hasn’t “ratified” it. Ratification requires being bound by international law and having to report regularly to the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, which monitors compliance.

Why hasn’t the U.S. ratified? Katie Jay – author of the “Children Deserve Families” blog told me that recognizing that children have a right to a safe and secure permanent family is cutting edge human rights law. The idealistic part of me scoffs at that, saying;

“Really? Cutting edge? To provide security, safety, and nourishment to children is cutting edge?” But the lobbyist part of me knows that it can sometimes be a tricky thing for a country to formally declare something as a “human right.”

Because once you officially do that, then you have to do something about it…or be held accountable by an international authority and possibly give up your moral high ground if you are then seen as a country that doesn’t live up to its own standards. Sadly, from the standpoint of an American citizen who has watched our behavior on international environmental agreements with dismay, I can tell you that Americans generally don’t like the idea of international authority holding us accountable for just about anything.

Has your country ratified the Convention? Take a look at this paraphrased list of rights for children from the book and consider which of them you think are rights or privileges. Are all of them rights? What would be the ramifications for your country to truly grant that right in your country? Internationally? What benefits or problems do you see that could arise if the world embraced the Convention wholeheartedly?

  • I have the right to a first name, a last name, a family, and a country that I can call my home.
  • I have the right to have enough food to eat and water to drink.
  • I have the right to live under a roof, to be warm, but not too hot, not to be poor and to have just enough of what I need, not more.
  • I have the right to be cured with the best medicines that were ever invented.
  • I have the right to go to school without having to pay.
  • I have the same rights whether I am a girl or a boy.
  • I have exactly the same right to be respected whether I am black or white, small or big, rich or poor, born here or somewhere else.
  • I have the right to be helped by my parents, my friends, and my country if my body doesn’t work as well as other children’s.
  • I have the right to be free from any kind of violence, and no one has the right to take advantage of me because I am a child. 
  • I have the right to go to school and refuse to go to work.
  • I have the right to be protected by adults and to be sheltered from disasters
  • I have the right never to experience war or weapons.
  • I have the right to breathe clean air.
  • I have the right to play, to create, to imagine, and also to have friends.
  • I have the right to learn about friendship, peace and respect for our planet.
  • I have the right to express myself completely freely.
 

This is an original post written for World Moms Blog by Cindy Levin.

Cindy Levin

Cynthia Changyit Levin is a mother, advocate, speaker, and author of the upcoming book “From Changing Diapers to Changing the World: Why Moms Make Great Advocates and How to Get Started.” A rare breed of non-partisan activist who works across a variety of issues, she coaches volunteers of all ages to build productive relationships with members of Congress. She advocated side-by-side with her two children from their toddler to teen years and crafted a new approach to advocacy based upon her strengths as a mother. Cynthia’s writing and work have appeared in The New York Times, The Financial Times, the Washington Post, and many other national and regional publications. She received the 2021 Cameron Duncan Media Award from RESULTS Educational Fund for her citizen journalism on poverty issues. When she’s not changing the world, Cynthia is usually curled up reading sci-fi/fantasy novels or comic books in which someone else is saving the world.

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LAOS:  The Staggering Stunting of Children Under Five

LAOS: The Staggering Stunting of Children Under Five

laos kidsWhile I still have the opportunity to write another post for the WMB community before leaving Laos later this year, I feel compelled to tell you about child nutrition and the problem of stunting in Laos because stunting is a seemingly invisible problem that can go unnoticed unless special attention is drawn to highlight the issue.
Ethnically, most Southeast Asian people are shorter and have a smaller frames than most other races throughout the world. This fact makes it easy to say that Lao babies and children tend to be small or smaller because of their race.

Yet at first glance Lao children appear to be healthy (and super cute), a closer look and personal interaction will almost always reveal that the children are a few years older than what you had first assumed. I recently met an adorable girl in a northern village at a school where I delivered books by boat since there is no road access to her village. Upon speaking with her (in Lao) I was impressed by how well behaved, articulate and “mature” she was for what I assumed to be a 6-year old. (I have two 4-year old twins so I was instantly optimistic about their potential in just two short years to be as well behaved as this girl.) She turned out to be 10-years old. This has happened time and time again to me, to my colleagues, and to many newcomers to Laos.

Lao children are among the most undernourished in Southeast Asia with 44% stunting of children under 5-years old. It is the single largest contributor to infant and child mortality in the country with 59% of all child deaths related to nutritional deficiencies. Chronic malnutrition predisposes children to higher morbidity and mortality, lower educational attainment, and reduced workforce productivity.

For a country experiencing rapid economic growth and increasing income disparities, fierce external human resource competition puts the country at risk of leaving a majority of the Lao population behind others who will be more able to keep apace. Stunting is a problem that needs be addressed for the immediate wellbeing of Lao children and to be resolved for the future potential of the Lao people.

The Lao government is working closely with experts and development partners on how to tackle this important issue. It is not easy. Poor breast-feeding and weaning practices are widespread. Almost all mothers give food supplements (such as chewed glutinous rice), and pure water, to infants within a few weeks of birth. Harmful practices (such as discarding colostrum) and other food taboos for pregnant women reduce disease resistance for newborns and increase fetal undernutrition. Micronutrient deficiencies, inadequate intake of vitamin A, anemia and iodine deficiency, all further hinder child development.

The current health system is not only faced with challenges of delivering micronutrients, immunizations and necessary vitamins to the most vulnerable population, but they are additionally burdened by the daunting task of changing people’s behaviors to improve dietary habits, increase nutritional intake, and overcoming cultural belief and religious belief obstacles to improved nutrition status among rural and multi-ethnic communities. The task is daunting.

What is being done and what needs to be done?

There are some great organization here making slow but successful strides on a small-scale basis. UNICEF, WFP, IFAD, Save the Children, the Scale Up Nutrition initiative and others who are collaborating closely with government health officials, but resources are scarce, especially in an often overlooked country like Laos.

  1. We can channel financial support to these organizations for their work on nutrition in Laos.
  2. We can lobby our governments to increase foreign assistance resources to address the poor state of healthcare in Laos (e.g., Laos is not one of the United States’ ‘priority countries’ receiving Global Health Initiative (GHI) funding. Ask U.S. representatives, Why not?)
  3. We can voice our concern to private and public interests who are taking advantage of opportunities in Laos to improve their social welfare practices by investing in better healthcare in communities where they pursue their business interests.
  4. We can ask the question to anyone willing to listen about who should be accountable to improving the welfare of children beginning their lives under such great odds in Laos.

Hopefully someday, someone will listen and take action.

This is an original post to World Moms Blog by our mother of twins writer, Dee Harlow in Vientiane, Laos. You can always find her writing on her blog, Wanderlustress.

Photo credit attributed to the author.

Dee Harlow (Laos)

One of Dee’s earliest memories was flying on a trans-Pacific flight from her birthplace in Bangkok, Thailand, to the United States when she was six years old. Ever since then, it has always felt natural for her to criss-cross the globe. So after growing up in the northeast of the US, her life, her work and her curiosity have taken her to over 32 countries. And it was in the 30th country while serving in the Peace Corps in Uzbekistan that she met her husband. Together they embarked on a career in international humanitarian aid working in refugee camps in Darfur, Sudan, and the tsunami torn coast of Aceh, Indonesia. Dee is now a full-time mother of three-year old twins and continues to criss-cross the globe every two years with her husband who is in the US Foreign Service. They currently live in Vientiane, Laos, and are loving it! You can read about their adventures at Wanderlustress.

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