UN appreciates China's efforts on innovation for children

UNITED NATIONS -- China's effort to drive innovation for children is going well, Executive Director of the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) Anthony Lake said here on Thursday.

"For China, it produces so many innovations," Lake told Xinhua."And when I talk about innovations, I'm not only talking about technological innovations but also new ways of thinking and doing things."

Lake shared with Xinhua his experience in China a couple of months ago. He said he visited villages in the most disadvantaged areas, where people were experimenting new ways of teaching recommended and coordinated by UNICEF and the Chinese government. "The experiment was going very well and China will take it to scale some of these ideas around other areas."

Earlier Thursday, UNICEF released a report, titled Re-imagine the Future: Innovation for Every Child, to call on governments, development professionals, businesses, activists and communities to work together to drive new ideas for tackling most pressing problems facing children.

Marking 25 years of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, UNICEF on Thursday also launched the UNICEF Imagine project, a musical and technological initiative to highlight the challenges, and raise funds for UNICEF's work in more than 190 countries and territories.

UNICEF also launched an APP in which people can sing along with a music video of a new version "Imagine," a song written by John Lenon, a world-famous musician. His widow Yoko Ono participated in Thursday's launching event.

Speaking of the project, Lake said, "we hope to reach people and are reaching people all the way around the world who can come together through songs, through their voices on behalf of children's rights and through the miracle of technology."

"They can then download the APP and sing along with world-famous singers and have their voices recorded so that...people from all around the world will join in the song and that includes many many millions of people throughout China who care about children and children's rights and...that will be a huge boost to the whole exercise," he added.