The Journey of Young Makers

This is the journey of a young mechatronic engineer who is the founder of Joint Rehabilitation Device project (JRD), Pham Nhat Tan, 23, who specialized in Mechatronics Engineering at Bach Khoa University in Ho Chi Minh City. 

Mechatronics is a multidisciplinary field of science that combines mechanical engineering, electronics, computers, telecommunications, systems and control engineering. Tan is a fresh graduate student, having a passion for robotics and in love with machines having their own behaviour to support human’s lives. How they work, how to make them work hooked him.

UPSHIFT Vietnam: Impact through Incubation

Members of the four final teams with their mentors and the UPSHIFT team, including Mr. Jesper Moller, Deputy Representative at UNICEF Vietnam
UPSHIFT Demo Day © UNICEF/Innovations Lab Ho Chi Minh/UPSHIFT Demo Day/ Tran Thanh Son/ May 2016

In our last update, we had selected 5 teams to join the UPSHIFT Incubator for 3 months. During incubation teams participated in additional training sessions, received a small seed fund to kick start their project, and ongoing mentorship. They also had the benefit of access to a network of supporters and periodic events through Viet Youth Entrepreneurs (VYE). All these factors combined to support these teams take their concept to reality.

Young Makers in Vietnam work to change the lives of Children with Disabilities

From June 3rd to 5th 2016, 7 teams consisting of over 70 young people including designers, engineers, artisans, medical professionals and children with disabilities gathered on the campus of the Vietnam-German University (VGU) in Binh Duong, Vietnam to contribute to a better world. For 72 hours these youth participated in the inaugural T.O.M:Vietnam Makeathon (www.fb.com/TOMVietnam2016) to apply their skills to design and prototype open source solutions for children with disabilities.

UNICEF Viet Nam\2016\Truong Viet Hung

What does child-sensitive planning mean for equitable advancement?

Viet Nam has made impressive progress in the realisation of women’s and children’s rights. One of the key guiding principles for its development is the Socio-economic Development Plan (SEDP) that promotes economic growth combined with the implementation of social advance, equality and improvement of life quality. However, there are still millions of Vietnamese children deprived of essential needs including education, health, water and sanitation, shelter, refrained child labour, leisure and social protection. Let’s follow the story of Tao, a Tay ethnic minority girl to see what policy makers could do to change the situations with their socio-economic development planning.

Nutrition in the mountains of Viet Nam

Field diary, part one

I recently travelled to the mountains in the far north of Viet Nam with UNICEF colleagues and the Ministry of Health to visit a UNICEF-supported nutrition programme aiming to improve child nutrition among the minority Hmong people. The Hmong, numbering around a million in Viet Nam, live in remote mountain villages and cultivate rice and some maize on steep terraced fields.

The levels of undernutrition among the Hmong – as measured by stunting (when a child is too short for their age) – are extremely high. In some areas stunting is as high as 75 percent. I don’t recall coming across such high rates anywhere else in the world. The average in the northern mountainous province of Lao Cai is 40 percent, almost twice the national average in Viet Nam.

© UNICEF EAPRO/2015/Christiane Rudert

A H'mong infant is fed nutrient-rich porridge, prepared at the child feeding and care club in Lao Cai

Co-creation Workshop in Viet Nam Seeks to Solve Serious Global Problems with Wearable and Sensors

While Viet Nam is well known for its ICT community, a recent UNICEF workshop focused on understanding how to apply technology, not how to build it. Built on a series of “what if” questions, the UNICEF Innovation Lab in Viet Nam asked; What if we could get a room full of smart people with different backgrounds and expertise to focus on a grand challenge to accelerate the use of technology to make a positive impact on the lives of children? What if we could inspire these innovators with a new world of possibilities? The ask built on the Wearables for Good design challenge that was launched earlier this year by UNICEF, ARM and frog.

In designing the Viet Nam event, there were collaborative inputs from the local maker community, agile developers, design thinking & creative professionals and even the venue was a community based art education facility. And the results were astounding.

40 years with the children of Viet Nam

Viet Nam and UNICEF have a long history of cooperation and trust. Following reunification in 1975, UNICEF launched a nation-wide programme to meet the basic needs of Viet Nam’s girls and boys. Since UNICEF’s first days in Viet Nam, the country programme has shifted from emergency response and reconstruction, to meeting basic needs in health and education, to today concentrating on improving social services, while supporting sound policy and an effective legal framework to ensure each one of the country’s 26 million girls and boys can meet his or her full potential. #UNICEF@40