Joint attempt to save children

Efforts made to reduce death rate among infants, promote health and nutrition

A Memorandum of Understanding for cooperation among Unilever, Save the Children, the China Development Research Foundation and the Meishan government of Sichuan province was signed in Beijing to jointly carry out pilot projects for mountain village kindergartens in Sichuan.

The move marked the official launch of the Early Childhood Development Program, part of Unilever's Everyone project.

Every year, more than 7 million children die of preventable diseases across the world. In 2009, Save the Children launched its "Everyone" program to save infant lives. The program aims to make sure that all countries can reach the United Nations Millennium Development Goal of reducing mortality rates among infants aged below 5 by two-thirds by the year 2015.

At the beginning of 2012, Unilever and Save the Children reached a strategic cooperation agreement under which the two sides would jointly carry out the Everyone program across the world in the next three years and would invest 1.8 million euros ($2.33 million) in China in projects that would promote infant health, nutrition and early childhood development in Beijing, Shanghai, Sichuan, Yunnan and Tibet. The Everyone program in China would directly benefit 20,000 children and 30,000 parents.

In order to better implement the Everyone program in China, Unilever and Save the Children, together with the China Development Research Foundation, launched the mountain village kindergarten project in Hongya county in Meishan, Sichuan province, in July 2012. The project, as part of the global Everyone program, covers various areas of early childhood development, such as education and health. It also evaluates policies concerning early childhood development and raises awareness of them among parents and the general public.

Pre-school education is provided mainly by the private sector and teaching and management capacity are yet to be improved. In view of the situation, the mountain village kindergarten project aims to improve pre-school education in Hongya through the recruitment of local voluntary teachers, the organization of the training of teachers, nutrition intervention and health education in kindergartens and the provision of equipment for kindergartens.

"Through the project, efforts would also be made to explore a workable model with safeguards for pre-school education in moderately developed rural areas," said Lu Mai, secretary-general of the China Development Research Foundation.

In addition to co-operation in the mountain village kindergarten project, Unilever also supports the China Development Research Foundation in its policy research, hoping that the pilot projects for mountain village kindergartens could help promote the formulation of national policies on early childhood development, which in turn would promote social justice and narrow the development gap between children in poor areas and those in cities and other developed areas.

Local governments also give strong backing by investing in early childhood development.