Q&As and Commentary
Q&As and Commentary from UNICEF East Asia and Pacific Regional Office:
Q&A with Jon Kapp, coordinator of the Asia–Pacific EFAInfo database on education
A. EFAInfo was conceived as a tool to help countries assess their progress and gaps, especially at subnational and disaggregated levels, towards achieving the EFA goals for the mid-decade ‘report card’.
Q&A with Diana Chang Blanc, UNICEF EAPRO Regional Immunization Specialist, and Dr. Francois Gasse, head of UNICEF’s global Maternal and Neonatal Tetanus Elimination Initiative
Despite the wide availability of a vaccine to prevent tetanus, it remains a serious risk to infants in 46 countries, eight of which are in East Asia and the Pacific. In 2004, 128,000 neonatal deaths due to tetanus occurred globally...
Q&A with Jesper Moller, UNICEF monitoring and evaluation specialist, and Laura Bill, emergency specialist, on managing information needs in emergencies
UNICEF has invested significantly in developing a database known as DevInfo to establish universal standards for human development indicators for use by all United Nations agencies and other organizations. DevInfo was initially designed to monitor...
Q&A with Alexander Krueger, UNICEF Child Protection Specialist: UNICEF's response to the situation of orphans in China and Myanmar
Children suffer the most in disaster situations – they tend to make up the largest numbers who don’t survive. Those who do may have lost their parents or whole families.
Q&A on sanitation in East Asia
Access to improved sanitation facilities varies widely from country to country. It is lowest in Cambodia, which had an estimated 28 per cent total sanitation coverage in 2006, followed by Timor-Leste with an estimated 36 per cent and Lao PDR...
Q&A with Dr. Stephen Atwood, UNICEF Child Survival Specialist: Hundreds of thousands of children in this region do not survive the first three days of life!
Despite considerable progress in reducing mortality among children younger than 5, some 3,000 children continue to die daily in the East Asia and Pacific region. Of them, an estimated 32 per cent die within the first three days of life.
Q&A with Joachim Theis, Adolescent Development and Participation Specialist: Children's citizenship and civil rights
The reason we’re talking about children’s civil rights and citizenship is because the term ‘participation’ has largely lost its meaning. It’s become so broad and vague and everyone understands something different by the term.
Q&A with Emmanuelle Abrioux, UNICEF Life Skills in Education Specialist
Teaching life skills has become a critical element in UNICEF's definition of quality education. But ‘life skills’ is a term that different agencies and educators apply differently.
We know about the power of breastfeeding ... Why do fewer and fewer mothers choose differently?
According to the 2007 report, only 43 per cent of women in the region breastfeed exclusively for the first six months of their babies’ lives. This reflects a progressive downward trend from 56 per cent in 1999. A year ago, it was 52 per cent.
Q&A with Shelley Casey, UNICEF Child Protection Specialist: New Tactics for Juvenile Offenders
The number of children committing criminal offences has sharply raised public concern. Though most children commit only minor, petty crimes, the tendency is to lock them up – as a punishment and as an education or rehabilitation measure.
