Sustainable Business for Children
Working together for children
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- Tiếng Việt
The Challenges
Children are key stakeholders in business.
They are consumers, employees’ daughters and sons, young workers, future employees and the next generation of business leaders.
In communities throughout Viet Nam, children are exposed to products and influenced by marketing practices. Business operations also leave an environmental footprint, with pollutants affecting the air children breathe and the water they drink.
Yet, children do not have a seat at the table and children's rights largely overlooked when businesses sit down to assess standards, policies and practices.
Today, child labour continues to exist, workplaces still fail to support parent workers, online marketing still exploits child labour, environmental regulations are still flouted, and many local companies still do not follow responsible business practices despite integration into the global economy.
To ensure better business for children, all companies need to understand and address their impacts on the most vulnerable members of society, rather than just taking action when things go wrong.
Solutions
Putting children first means rethinking how we do business.
UNICEF is helping to drive this change in Viet Nam by engaging the business community to strengthen its knowledge, capacity and commitment to respect and support children’s rights.
This means harnessing the power of business to put children first in the workplace, the marketplace, the community and the environment through adoption of the Children’s Rights and Business Principles.
To achieve this, we offer practical tools to guide companies on how to integrate respect for children’s rights into their day-to-day operations and business models.
Through championing a diversity and inclusion approach in the workplace, in step with embedding children's rights into companies’ Environment Social and Governance (ESG) agendas, we help ensure the rights of children, young workers, working parents and caregivers are protected and realized.
For new mothers, this should translate into breastfeeding in workplace, health and nutrition support. For all parents, paid parental leave and flexible work arrangements, as well as workplace-based childcare facilities. For young employees, decent work and wages should be a reality, as well as training opportunities to build 21st Century skills to adapt to a dynamically changing world. While for children and adolescents as consumers, they must be safe in the marketplace and online from exploitative company practices.
To ensure these steps forward are sustainable, we also work with government partners, so they have the knowledge and resources to hold the business community to account and meet labour, environmental, climate and human rights standards. This reality also sees companies transparently reporting to stakeholders and the public on how they are putting children's rights first.
You can be the change for children!
Help UNICEF provide children and families with critical essential services for health and nutrition, education and protection.
Impact
UNICEF is working with businesses to ensure their commitment, resources, and innovative approaches redefine the landscape for comprehensive development of children in Viet Nam. By 2026, increased company investments in realizing child and parental rights will not only yield returns in economic terms, but also in the well-being of future generations. In doing so, this work will create corporate champions to influence industry standards and practices across Viet Nam’s business landscape.
