Around 300 children of poor and underprivileged families in central Quang Binh province on July 10 got free milk from the “Vietnam Rising” Milk Fund in 2013. The free delivery of the donation, which is equivalent to 26,000 glasses of milk, in Quang Binh, marked the fund’s first stop of this year’s journey. The fund’s following destinations during July and the upcoming August will be northern Yen Bai province and southern Phu Quoc island district. For this year, the Milk Fund has set to provide free milk to 13,348 underprivileged children being brought up in 223 children’s caring centers located in 58 provinces and cities nationwide. Supported by the Ministry of Labor, Invalids and Social Affairs, the Vietnam Children Sponsoring Fund and the Vietnam Dairy Products Joint Stock Company (Vinamilk), the fund has entered the fifth year of its operation. Over the time, it has offered free over 20 million glasses of milk, worth around 75 billion VND, to nearly 300,000 poor children nationwide. One in every three Vietnamese children under five is stunted with low consumption of milk being one of the reasons for the high malnutrition rate, according to a recently released official data. (vietnamplus.vn July 10)
