The Human Safety Net For Families programme is scaling up its partnership with UNICEF in Vietnam to expand successful pilot projects in 15 additional cities around the country, as well as providing mobile access via digital learning platforms.
The Nurturing Infants Children and Environments (NICE) programme in Vietnam is an integrated early childhood development programme aimed at parents and caregivers of young children, especially among ethnic minorities and urban migrants. Run by UNICEF it has been developed based on the Canadian ‘Nobody is Perfect’ parenting programme and adapted to suit the local context.
With additional support from The Human Safety Net’s Scale Up Impact initiative, UNICEF, in partnership with the Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs and the Vietnam Chamber of Commerce, will roll out the NICE programme to reach even more parents and children all across the country.
Along with the Government and UNICEF, the corporate sector will be a key partner to advancing early childhood development in the country with its commitment to uphold children’s rights through corporate family-friendly policies and programmes.
The multi-faceted collaboration aims to build networks of support in the communities and in factories for parents, providing them the knowledge and skills to care for their children and build positive parent-child relationships. This will also help reduce violence against children by learning through play, reinforcing positive and managing difficult behaviors, creating structure and routines, talking about Covid-19, and managing stress and conflict.
At the same time, family-friendly policies, such as paid parental leave, breastfeeding support, childcare and child grants, giving parents the time and resources they need to build their babies’ brains, will also promoted as best practices.
The Human Safety Net Key has been working with UNICEF in the country since 2019. Its role will be to contribute parenting materials, as well as helping to expand and deepen the NICE parenting training in provinces across the country.
The launch of the expanded partnership in Hanoi was one of the events in the city marking World Children’s Day 2021.