With partners such as Arus Academy, DiGi Telecommunications and Malaysia Digital Economy Corporation, UNICEF supported the Ministry of Education via its Digital Educational Learning Initiative Malaysia (DELIMa) platform to keep over 3 million children learning during school closures, through innovative programming such as Teacher Digital Learning Community, Global Citizenship Education, Future Skills For All and Voices of COVID Generation.

The Voices of COVID Generation (VOCG) featured project-based lessons on mathematics, science, geography and history, drawn from the local curriculum, and were made available to all adolescents.

It also served as an outlet for students to share their feelings about the pandemic, fostering a sense of community and belonging while their schooling was disrupted, earning it an honourable commendation from the Wenhui Award 2020 for innovative education responses to COVID-19.

Teachers too were not left behind and supported with Teacher Digital Learning Community — established to help them build the required skills to be effective online remote educators.

• 3,500 teachers from 2,000 schools accessed the online teacher training modules. 48% were from rural schools.
• 1,500 resources for teachers in 25 formats which received over 57,000 views.
• Over 80,000 users reached via Global Citizenship Education project-based lessons.
• 120,000 page views, over 25,000 users and 2.6 million Tik Tok video views for Future Skills For All.
• Over 750,000 users reached through Voices of COVID Generation so they could access knowledge, explore their emotions and exercise agency during the pandemic.

Thanks to your support and that of our partners, we were able to move quickly to provide critical medical, health, hygiene and nutrition supplies, counselling services and cash assistance to the most vulnerable and their families.

More than 100 days after the explosions, your funds are making it possible for us to continue working with 70 on-the-ground partners to rebuild damaged schools, health facilities and lives.

• • 67 tons of medical supplies airlifted.
  • 22,000 children given emergency food rations and supplements.
  • 5,000 water tanks supplied to heavily affected hospitals.
  • 4,000 households re-connected to water supplies.
  • 107 million vaccine doses salvaged from damaged warehouses.

Click here to read Beirut one year on, a long slow road to recovery for children affected by the explosion.

As movement control orders kept everyone at home, your contributions helped us continue to empower our youth by giving them a voice and amplifying it through initiatives like Youth Talks! Climate Change, which was organised as a key event for World Children’s Day 2020 via the @KitaConnect programme.

Through @KitaConnect, we established digital spaces using UNICEF’s RapidPro technology and conference calling platforms where young people could learn, be supported, stay motivated and engage with each other through a series of COVID-19 related activities and challenges.

• 23 online sessions were held.
• 490,000 youth engaged.
• 18,984 youth with disabilities joined.

The Youth Talks! Climate Change event, which we hosted online alongside the United Nations Development Programme, in partnership with the Ministry of Environment and Water and Project VOCAL of EcoKnights, got youth voicing their concerns about how the accelerating climate crisis is impacting them and the generations to come.

• • 479 youth joined via Zoom.
  • Over 3,200 views on Facebook.
  • Mobilised young people, giving them a platform to express their concerns and solutions.

You helped us make play more inclusive for every child. We collaborated with Sime Darby Property and children with disabilities to design and build Malaysia’s first UNICEF Inclusive Playground in the City of Elmina in Shah Alam, Selangor.

In addition, we further widened our network of support for children with disabilities and their parents by partnering with the National Early Childhood Intervention Council to deliver online learning, early intervention therapy and psychosocial/mental health support during COVID-19 lockdown.

Frequent and prolonged movement control orders triggered by COVID-19 outbreaks meant that children have been kept out of schools and at home with their parents 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Already a tough challenge for parents who work remotely, this hurdle is even tougher for those running low-income and crowded households with little to no support.

We collaborated with the World Health Organization, the Global Partnership to End Violence Against Children, the Internet of Good Things, USAID and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to create Parenting
Tipsheets: A series of free and easily-available online resources meant to help them successfully navigate their everyday challenges at home.

Here’s what we found:

1. Low-income families were much more likely to lose their jobs during the COVID-19 pandemic than the rest of the population.
2. Households headed by women and disabled people are the most vulnerable to losing their jobs.
3. 1 in 5 heads of household are depressed.
4. 6 in 10 households are unable to buy enough food for their families.
5. Roughly 1 in 2 parents say the mental health of their children has been affected by the movement control orders.
6. Children from low-income families face significant barriers to online learning due to a lack of access to the right devices, space to study, loss of motivation and their parents’ limited ability to support and supervise them.

We’ve presented these findings to the government and Parliamentarians, and as a result, have received extensive nationwide coverage. We continue to work with the government to help and protect these families through the pandemic with parenting, educational, mental health and nutrition services.

Following a series of deadly bullying cases in 2017, we initiated conversations around putting a stop
to violence among and against children. As a result, impact journalism team R.AGE and property developer SP Setia created the #StandTogether campaign to advocate kindness, empathy and unity in schools, with UNICEF as the official supporting partner.

With your support, this initiative also culminated in National Kindness Week, a pro-kindness movement that the Ministry of Education instituted in schools throughout Malaysia, and which we expanded regionally as the Kindness Leaders Conference: Southeast Asia.

• 15,000 students made kindness, empathy and unity a priority at their schools.
• 6,000 Kindness Advocates were trained.
• 25 Members of Parliament endorsed the campaign.
• 11 countries joined in.
• 2,000 students throughout Asia were groomed to become Kindness Leaders.

As COVID-19 made its presence felt, so did a host of deep-seated inequalities among our poorest communities. The hardest hit were children already disadvantaged by discrimination, social exclusion and vulnerability.

Thanks to you, we were able to help relieve the damage from the pandemic that was inflicting on these communities in Sabah and Peninsular Malaysia. We partnered with Mercy Malaysia to teach them about good hygiene practices, showed them how to recognize the symptoms of COVID-19 and helped them understand how the virus is spread.

We reached over 73,500 refugees in Immigration Detention Centres, undocumented children in Alternative Learning Centres, the homeless, low-income communities, and children with disabilities.