A fair chance
Every child deserves a fair chance to grow happy and healthy in Malaysia.
What is the challenge?
What if all children had the same opportunities to fulfill their potential, grow into upstanding members of society and contribute to the rich landscape of our country?
But that is not the reality. In truth, our world is unfair and children are faced with many different challenges from the environment, and their situations. This inequality creates stumbling blocks for disadvantaged children from the day they are born.
There are many factors that contribute to a child being disadvantaged, struggling to survive and succeed in life. In Malaysia, these include:
- Uneven access to documentation that enables access to services
- Poverty and urban deprivation
- Living with disabilities
Poverty, and child poverty in particular, remains a persistent challenge. Even prior to COVID, 5.6 per cent of Malaysian households (405.4 thousand) lived in absolute poverty in Malaysia, while the poverty rate among households with children was even higher, at 8.4 per cent. Furthermore, around 47 per cent of B40 households contain children. These households are at high risk of falling into poverty.
Indeed, in 2020, as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, the number of households living below the absolute poverty line rose even further to 639.8 thousand and the number of households living in extreme poverty tripled to 78,000. The number of non-citizen households living in poverty is unknown, but is expected to be significantly higher than for Malaysian citizens.
In 2017, UNICEF’s ‘Children Without’ report highlighted the situation of children who live in low cost flats, right in the heart of the cities. Despite the National Poverty Rate being less than one percent, the study found that pockets of poverty remain and children in these flats experienced the effects of multi-dimensional poverty from malnutrition to reduced access to education.
In 2020, UNICEF embarked on a 3 part report to highlight how the families from the 2017 survey were coping with Movement Control brought about by the COVID pandemic and any changes to their already challenging situations in 2017.
How can we fix this?
Malaysia has made much progress in ensuring the well-being of its people but there are still areas for concern.
Policies have a critical impact on a child’s well-being and in order for it to take into account their needs; we need to make the system as child-friendly as possible.
To do this, UNICEF focuses on policy that impact children the most. In Malaysia, we focus on well-being, social inclusion and disparity reduction, and enhanced engagement and partnerships for child rights. We support social policy work in the country through:
- Research: includes activities such as studies, data collection, data analysis, and preparation of papers, reports, booklets, and books.
- Dissemination: such as: organizing talks, conferences, seminars, and publication of the papers, reports, booklets, and books.
- Building alliances involves engaging in building partnership with different institutions, academics, policy analysts, social scientists, policy makers, leaders, diplomats, and social figures both at the national and international level.
All these initiatives work to bring stakeholders together; ask critical questions; and spur collaboration to push for positive change for children in Malaysia.
