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Mr Lake’s visit to China, timed with this year’s celeation of the 25th Anniversary on the Rights of the Child, was an opportunity to reaffirm UNICEF’s long standing partnership with the Government and people of China. The visit included meetings with senior Government officials, as well as to schools in Yunnan Province to understand the dramatic progress the country has made for its 279 million children, which make up 15 percent of the world’s child population.

In the last two decades China has witnessed massive reduction in poverty, a 75 percent reduction in under-five child mortality and primary school enrolment rates of almost 100 per cent. The country has achieved the Millennium Development Goals related to under-five mortality, primary school education, poverty and nutrition and is on track to meet efforts to reduce maternal mortality.

According to the 2010 consensus, the number of children living in rural poverty-stricken areas was estimated to be 70 million, accounting for about 25 per cent of the child population nationwide. Children in these areas lagged behind other children in terms of health, enrolment in or completion of education, and access to household water and sanitation.

“The Government of China knows - we all know - that to an impoverished mother, struggling to provide for her family… or a girl who has to do housework rather than homework… or a boy who repeatedly falls sick because of poor sanitation systems … achieving national statistical progress is not meaningful to them”, Mr Lake said in remarks made at a welcome reception. “And the Government of China here knows the importance of addressing such disparities by making services available to the most excluded, especially children.”

In a classroom, he saw how a simple board game was used by a teacher to help children learn math. “Without that catalytic board game, the children would not have been as interactive. That is the key to quality learning and to early childhood development generally,” Mr Lake observed. “It is not just learning by rote but playing together, studying together, and responding to the teacher.”

Already the Government has adopted National Child Friendly School Standards. Social emotional learning, as a key component of this model, and with its focus on play and interactive teaching, is now also expected to be scaled up to other schools in China by 2015. To support the roll out to schools in other poor and remote areas, UNICEF is working with the Ministry of Education to develop teaching and learning materials so teachers are better equipped with the right skills and the quality of learning for students improves.