Advancing a Quality Independent Childcare Model in Vietnam

Programme Partner: OneSky

Region: Vietnam

In Southeast Asia, an estimated 31 million children under the age of six are at risk of not reaching their full potential due to lack of quality early care and education.

In Vietnam alone, over 400,000 young children of low-income factory workers spend up to 14 hours a day in independent childcare operated by providers who are well-meaning but lack the training, resources and support needed to provide safe care and stimulating learning opportunities.

OneSky has developed a programme to improve the quality of care in these low resourced communities and provide learning opportunities for children during their early years, a formative period when young minds create over a million new neural connections per second. Improving independent childcare provider knowledge and ensuring safe and nurturing learning environments for the young children of factory workers will level the playing field for these children, laying a pathway for their future learning so they have a chance to enter public primary school on par with children from more resourced communities.

With 25 years of expertise in training caregivers and early education providers in Asia, including pioneering a training programme in China that helped tens of thousands of once struggling children in orphanages and rural villages thrive and adopted by public policy, we are in a unique position to improve childcare provision in Vietnam.

Over the next five years, we will partner with Vietnam's Ministry of Education and Training (MOET) to pilot a Training of Trainers (TOT) approach to create safe, nurturing, and educational childcare benefitting 100,000 young children of low-income factory workers in 14 provinces. Once the pilot is proven in these provinces and public funding is secured, MOET intends to scale the programme to the remainder of the country, benefitting all children in independent childcare. OneSky will then prepare the model for adaption and expansion to at least two other countries in Asia, providing a regionally developed solution to the childcare crisis.