Vietnam

In Vietnam, hidden education fees keep children from education. In addition, migrant children are not considered equal to Vietnamese children and therefore have less access to education and health services and live in poorer households. Girls are structurally disadvantaged and female foetuses are deliberately aborted.

The Committee is concerned about societal discrimination against girls who consequently drop out of school and engage in early marriage, especially in the mountainous areas, and such discrimination also resulting in the practice of aborting female foetuses. Also, the Committee recommends that the State party raise awareness and provide access to services for adolescents in relation to sexual and reproductive health, respond to the increasing number of teenage pregnancies and abortions, and facilitate access to contraceptives, as well as to quality reproductive health services, assistance and counselling.

To improve the situation, the Committee recommends that the State party review existing policies and programmes to develop a rights-based approach in relation to children with disabilities, and effectively implement inclusive education and free-tuition policies in order to further facilitate children with disabilities in having access to school. The Committee further recommends to provide all schools with sufficient numbers of teachers who have skills in inclusive education so that all children with disabilities can enjoy access to high-quality inclusive education, with a particular focus on children with disabilities living in rural areas. Vietnam should also raise public awareness, and include children with disabilities in these awareness-raising and social-change interventions, to address widespread stigma and discrimination. In addition, the Committee recommends that the State Party reduce the trend to institutionalize children with disabilities and seek community-based child care solutions.

The Committee recommends that the State party take immediate steps to
promote common standards in health-care services for all children in all regions, and develop nutrition strategies, policies and legislation relating to positive infant and young-child feeding practices, aimed at reducing regional disparities relating to acute and chronic undernutrition. In addition, the Committee recommends to increase the resources available for district health centres and commune health stations and ensure that they have adequate human and material resources, particularly in relation to maternal health care and care of new-borns, infants and preschool children, and take measures, including awareness-raising campaigns and the expansion of service delivery, to increase immunization rates among infant and preschool children, paying special attention to ethnicity and geographic location.

The Committee is highly concerned that child labour remains widespread in the State party, in particular in the informal sector, and that labour inspections outreach is limited. Also, child inmates in drug detention centres are obliged to work and thus subject to forced labour.
Therefore, the Committee recommends that the State party take immediate and effective measures to eliminate child labour in unacceptable conditions, including at an early age and under dangerous conditions. The Committee also recommends that Vietnam implement effective measures to address the deep-rooted socioeconomic factors that push children into the workforce, in particular to increase the school attendance rate and reduce the school dropout rate with a view to avoiding child labour.

In spite of progress in certain areas of juvenile justice, the Committee expresses its concern about the lack of a comprehensive juvenile justice system, including the absence of a juvenile court, and the rising number of young offenders and the State party’s punitive system of dealing with young offenders. The Committee urges the State party to establish a specialized juvenile court and specialized police-protection units for children and to allocate adequate human, technical and financial resources to the juvenile justice system to ensure a focus on diversion and other alternative measures to deprivation of liberty, and ensure the provision of rehabilitation and reintegration programmes.

While welcoming the significant efforts made by the State party to reduce poverty, which have decreased the rate of poor households by 2 per cent per year, and while noting that Viet Nam moved from the group of poorest countries to the group of lower middle- income countries in 2010, the Committee is deeply concerned at the high number of children who still live in poverty in the State party. In addition, while noting the national target programme on clean water and rural sanitation currently under way, the Committee expresses its concern about serious gaps in the supply of safe drinking water, and about the inadequate sanitation facilities in the home and at schools, which affect the health of the child and the ability to retain children in schools.

Concluding observations on the third and fourth periodic reports released on 22 August 2012.More information about education in Vietnam: https://www.aljazeera.com