2019
Created in 1990, the French association Un Enfant par la Main aims to sponsor disadvantaged children throughout the world, while implementing solutions and development projects for their communities in collaboration with local partners.
Un Enfant par la Main runs development programmes in 18 countries in Africa, the Americas and Asia, benefiting nearly 150,000 children. Un Enfant par la Main is part of the international network ChildFund Alliance, like ChildFund Vietnam with which it has implemented some thirty projects.
For the project at hand, the association launched an online invitation for donations in 2019, raising more than €21,000 for the school’s development.
Supported project: construction of a school canteen, benefiting the nursery school in Quoc Toan on Vietnam’s northern border.
This project aims to increase the school enrolment rate in the region and to provide at least one healthy and balanced meal to each of the 121 children, aged 2 to 5.
Quoc Tuan school has benefited from several improvements in recent years to cope with its development: four classrooms were built between 2006 and 2010 and a covered playground was built in 2018.
The school canteen represents the school’s latest development focus, to improve the school environment in a sustainable way. Since its creation, the unsanitary state of the existing kitchen has forced teachers to prepare basic meals with little nutritional value, or even travel to a nearby school by motorcycle to get the meals. In addition, drop-out rates among schoolchildren in the region is on the rise, as their parents refuse to pay for poor school meals, and children no longer go to school.
The Foundation’s support has allowed funding to go the construction and the equipment of a 42‑square-metre fitted school canteen while training village community members and teachers to manage it. This project is therefore helping to provide a sustainable solution for the region’s children to return to school, by making the canteen self-sufficient.