A three-day nationwide campaign to provide some 9.5 million children aged six to 59 months in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) with Vitamin A supplements was launched on Friday in Kinkole, 30 km east of the capital, Kinshasa, by Arthur Z'Ahidi Ngoma, one of the country's four vice-presidents. According to the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF), who in collaboration with Congolese authorities are carrying out the initiative, recent studies have found that 60 percent of Congolese children aged five and under suffer from Vitamin A deficiency, which is an underlying cause of 40 percent of childhood deaths in the country.