Another report says that Vietnam has met MDG #1

We are seeing a lot of reports and studies being issued now just before next week's United Nations Millennium Development Goal conference. International aid organizations, charities and more are giving the heads of state some data before the summit to hopefully guide them into action.

The next report we would like to mention comes from a British think-tank. The Overseas Development Institute says that Vietnam and Ghana are leading the way in meeting the Millennium Development Goals. This echos a report we saw yesterday from Oxfam.

From this AFP article that we found at ABS-CBN news, we read more about MDG achievers.

On the positive side, Vietnam had made "unprecedented progress" in improving the lives of the poor, said the report.

The Asian country had managed to halve the proportion of underweight children and reduce the proportion of people living on less than one dollar a day from nearly two-thirds to one-fifth in 14 years, said the institute.

Ghana had reduced hunger by nearly three-quarters -- from 34 percent to nine percent between 1990 and 2004 -- an area in which it had outperformed all other countries around the world.

It is on course to achieve the Millennium goal of halving rates of poverty and hunger by 2015, said the think-tank.

Ten African countries -- including Ethiopia, Egypt and Angola -- had already halved their poverty levels, according to the ODI.

But the institute warned: "In other areas progress has been slower, or even reversed, and challenges remain in a number of countries."

It highlighted great variations in HIV infection rates across Africa and uneven progress in tackling hunger and poverty across Latin America.

Vietnam has halved poverty

From IRIN, a story about a new OXFAM report that says that Vietnam has already halved poverty before the Millennium Development Goal year of 2015.

A new Oxfam report highlights Vietnam's performance in meeting the UN Millennium Development Goal of halving hunger and reducing poverty five years ahead of the 2015 target.

"Vietnam's track record is one of the best in the world. They are absolutely a role model within East Asia and more broadly in the world," Steve Price-Thomas, Oxfam's Vietnam country director told IRIN on 14 September from Hanoi. According to Halving world Hunger: Still Possible, Vietnam has cut hunger and reduced poverty from about 58 percent of the population in 1993 to just 18 percent today. "To put this in perspective, this means that since 1993 roughly 6,000 people per day have been pulled out of hunger poverty," Price-Thomas said.

By focusing on agricultural land reform, Vietnam has made land distribution more equitable, invested heavily in irrigation and agricultural technology and maintained restrictions on rice exports until 2001, nurturing the domestic industry.

The UN Food and Agriculture Organization is set to announce on 14 September that the number of hungry people worldwide has dropped, for the first time in 15 years, from 1.23 billion in 2009 to 925 million.

A life threatening scrap metal search

From IRIN, this surprising story of the lengths that poverty stricken Vietnamese are willing to go for some money. In a life threatening search for scrap-metal to sell, some look for unexploded land mines scattered around the countryside.

Nguyen Luong Quy was planting a tree on a coffee plantation on the outskirts of Buon Ma Thout, the largest city in Vietnam’s Central Highlands in 2000, when his shovel hit a hard metal object.

“There was a big explosion and I must have been knocked unconscious,” the 37-year-old farmer told IRIN. “I woke up in hospital and at first I thought I was dead because everything was white.”

Although his left arm was blown off, Quy survived the blast, caused by a bomblet - one of millions of cluster bombs dropped by American forces between 1964 and 1973.

But despite his first-hand experience of the dangers of unexploded ordnance (UXO), like many poor Vietnamese, Quy continues to scavenge for the metal contained in cluster bomblets and other unexploded munitions.

According to a 2009 study by the Vietnamese Ministry of Defense’s Technology Center for Bomb and Mine Disposal (BOMICEN) and the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation, more than 35 percent of the land in six central provinces - including Nghean, Ha Tinh, Quang Binh, Quang Tri, Thua Thien Hue and Quang Ngai - is contaminated with UXO.

Since the end of the war in 1975, 10,529 people have been killed and 12,231 injured by UXO in the overwhelmingly rural provinces.

Quang Tri and Quang Binh, on either side of the former demilitarised zone that divided communist North Vietnam from the US-backed southern regime, are the worst affected.

But while 28 percent of the UXO victims were farming at the time of their accident, 34 percent were actively searching for scrap metal, many driven by poverty, the same study revealed.

According to the Vietnamese government, 12 percent of the population lives below the national rural poverty line of just under US$11 per person per month, and around $14 per person per month in urban areas.

Life-threatening business

Thousands of poor Vietnamese continue to make a living or supplement their income by using metal detectors to locate unexploded bombs, and then trying to defuse them before selling them on to metal scrap dealers.

It is an extremely dangerous business, however. Although landmines can be deactivated by trained professionals, the cluster bomblets that contain the most valuable metals are impossible to defuse safely.

The global financial downturn has made matters worse, say NGOs. “Scrap metal provides a decent and immediate income without needing any qualifications or investment,” notes Tran Hong Chi from Clear Path International (CPI), an UXO victim assistance charity in Dong Ha, the provincial capital of Quang Tri.

“It’s not just farmers or the jobless who need the money. In July, a teacher was killed while digging up a bomb during his summer vacation. He had a good job and should have known about the risks.”

At the same time, the global economic slowdown is straining the budgets of the NGOs involved in mine clearance.

Chi says this year will be tough for CPI because it lost two key donors in 2009. The same goes for Mines Advisory Group (MAG), one of the main mine-clearance NGOs in Vietnam. Its Vietnam division, which had a budget of $3 million for 2009, lost half its donors last year.

But according to Jimmy Roodt, MAG’s country manager in Vietnam, the economic downturn is just part of the problem.

Mine strategy

A number of donors remain unhappy that Vietnam, unlike neighbouring Cambodia, has yet to adopt a national mine action strategy.

In Vietnam, the UXO issue is largely the domain of the military. Though the government is now working on a national strategy document, Roodt believes this will not be finalized for several years.

Nguyen Thi Thanh An, a childhood injury prevention specialist with the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) in Hanoi, who also sits on Vietnam’s informal UXO working group, agreed: “Without a national centre like they have in Cambodia, there’s no central casualty database to measure morbidity and mortality so we don’t have reliable data to demonstrate to donors how bad the problem is.”

She added that Vietnam would also attract more donors if it signed up to the international treaties prohibiting the use of landmines and cluster munitions - including the 1997 Ottawa Convention.

At the current pace, Phan Duc Tuan, deputy head of the army’s Military Engineering Command, said it would take 300 years and more than $10 billion to clear Vietnam of bombs, shells and mines.

However, said Roodt: “It’s not about clearing every inch but about reducing threat levels.”

“Vietnam,” he added, “is growing fast and, in terms of value for money, there is no country where you could have a greater impact from investing in mine clearance than here.”

Struggling to earn money in Hanoi

There may be more economic opportunities in the city, but there are more costs as well. Many people will move into urban areas hoping to get one of the jobs in the city, but instead are stuck in the slums surrounding the city.

A story we found this morning at New America Media gives a couple of examples of people who are trying to make due in the city of Hanoi, Vietnam. The country has suffered with high inflation during the last few years, and the people struggle even harder to earn enough to feed themselves.

Nguoi-Viet reporter Jami Farkas introduces us to Nguyen Kim Thu.

Using her facemask to pad the sweat on her suntanned brow, Nguyen Kim Thu looks dispiritedly at her stall, which is still filled with vegetables, as few customers have called since she opened early in the morning.

But the vegetable trader doesn’t dare close the stall, even for a short 15-minute lunch, because she is afraid of missing that rare customer. She buys a small morsel of steamed glutinous rice that she can eat without going anywhere.

''I know there are few customers at noon. But it’s good to grab even one more customer. Vegetables have been selling slowly for several days, and I haven’t made any profit,'' the 45-year-old woman said.

Thu, an employee at an engineering factory in Hanoi, has to sell vegetables for extra income because she has been asked to take days off from work by the company, which is going through tough financial times.

She buys wholesale vegetables every morning at 3 a.m. and resells them at an open-air market on the dusty and crowded pavement on Minh Khai Street in Hanoi.

Thu’s husband, a retired blacksmith, runs a small motorbike repair shop on Bach Mai Street. But he also has trouble earning money as he has no formal training and motorists prefer taking their bikes to branded repair shops.

''I make $2.20 a day on average. On lucky days, maybe $3.30 to $3.85,'' Thu said.

''My husband gets only $1.65. The money is not enough to cover our living expenses in the city. I always have to borrow money from my relatives in order to live.''

A story about Vietnamese school children

Oxfam activist Izzy Bensaad had a chance to write an opinion piece for the U.K. Newspaper the Edinburgh Evening News. In his commentary, Bensaad appeals to the British government for more funding for international aid and development. As an example on how international aid can help, Bensaad relates this story told to him from an Oxfam worker in Vietnam.

I had a timely reminder of that this week, just before yesterday's Department for International Development's white paper consultation. I met Trang, a Vietnamese programme officer working with Oxfam in his country.

Trang told me about the school in the area where he works and what children have to do to get any sort of education.

For a child to go to school they must set off on their journey in the early morning to begin a minimum trek of two hours.

There are no cafeterias so no-one can complain about sloppy school dinners; children take a bag of rice to sustain them during the long day of staring at the poorly qualified teacher dictating words at the packed rows of desks, in a dialect which is foreign to them.

Trang told me of the poverty that disables his community every day.

What struck me most was the perpetual cycle of need caused by the lack of education: 72 million children in developing countries have no education, more than two in every three of them girls.

These children may never learn the skills that represent their best chance of escaping poverty.

We have the power to change this. With Oxfam's support the school Trang told me about has changed. It has a kitchen, local assistant teachers that can help overcome language barriers, a better learning environment and they are working with the DFID to improve the methodology of teaching practice.

Nations begin to barter for food

We are beginning to see the effects of the global credit crunch is having on nations securing food.

Experts have been telling us for a while that credit drying up will make it harder for underdeveloped nations to obtain credit to buy food. They have warned of the damages this could have for world trade. This also raises prices for locally grown food.

Now some countries have begun to admit that they are bartering for food staples. Javier Bias from the Financial Times lists some of the countries who have fessed up to bartering.

In a striking example of how the global financial crisis and high food prices have strained the finances of poor and middle-income nations, countries including Russia, Malaysia, Vietnam and Morocco say they have signed or are discussing inter-government and barter deals to import commodities from rice to vegetable oil.
...
The countries have not disclosed the value of any deals, and some have refused even to confirm their existence. Officials estimated that they ranged from $5m for smaller contracts to more than $500m for the biggest.

Josette Sheeran, head of the United Nations’ World Food Programme, said senior government officials, including heads of state, had told the WFP they were facing “difficulties” obtaining credit to purchase food. “This could be a big problem,” she told the Financial Times.

Last week, Malaysia’s commodities minister, Datuk Peter Chin Fah Kui, said Kuala Lumpur had already signed a barter deal swapping palm oil for fertilizer and machinery with North Korea, Cuba and Russia. He said Malaysia was talking to Morocco, Jordan, Syria and Iran about other barter deals.

“[Bartering] could be used for contracts with other countries that do not have the cash,” Mr Chin told the local press. “We can set the conditions for them to supply us with the raw materials that we need.”

Thailand, the world’s largest exporter of rice, is discussing barter deals with Middle Eastern countries, including Iran. The Philippines, the world’s largest importer of rice, has secured rice needs for this year through a diplomatic agreement with Hanoi.

Planning to provide water and sanitation in Asia

Money has been raised to help draw up plans for a major water and sanitation project.

The Asian Development Bank helped to pool together several loans to help fund the project. The total money that will be loaned is 1.5 million dollars.

The money will be used to draw up plans for water and sanitation for an area in Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam. As the local governments don't have the money to do a big project themselves.


200,000 people in 9 different towns will benefit from the project. The bank believes those towns could become tourism or transportation hubs when the right infrastructure is in place.

Again, this is just for drawing up the plans, I imagine more fund raising will have to be done to actually install the water works.

Here is a snippet from the ADB's press release that details the poor condition of the towns, and some more details about the project.

The towns identified for the planned project have high poverty levels and poor, or even non-existent, water supply and sanitation services. With improved infrastructure, they have the potential to develop into transport and tourism hubs.

The technical assistance will be used to determine the services needed for each town, the appropriate level of user charges, and the financial and technical capacity of participating public utilities and local governments, in order to design a project that is both realistic and sustainable.

At present, many local governments are unable to provide potable water and sanitation services 24 hours a day because of the high investment costs involved. At the same time, consumers face high tariffs that many cannot afford, or are unwilling to pay, making the rollout of new services financially unsustainable.

Major emphasis will also be given to improving sanitation services as few local governments in developing towns consider it a priority. Sanitation plans will be drawn up for each town, identifying cost-effective technologies, investment requirements, implementation and operating needs, and other actions needed to improve sanitation and promote hygiene.

New threat of flooding in south Vietnam

from IRIN

Most of the rice in Vietnam has been harvested, so flooding shouldn't hurt food supply. However, many people need to be evacuated as the flood waters make their way to southern Vietnam. - Kale

HANOI - Aid officials say emergency supplies have reached nearly all of those affected by recent heavy flooding in northern Vietnam. But as clean-up efforts continue, the country faces a fresh assault as river levels rise dangerously in the south.

“Because of global warming, Vietnam is experiencing more floods and disasters,” said Setsuko Yamazaki, director of the UN Development Programme, addressing an inter-agency briefing this week on the damage done by the latest storm.

A total of 133 people were killed and 34 are missing after tropical storm Kammuri hit Vietnam 7-9 August, government officials said. Many residents died in their sleep when mudslides crushed their homes. Large swaths of rice fields were literally swept away, taking with them families’ livelihoods.

In the province of Lao Cai, 18 percent of farming land was destroyed, said Tran Van Tuan, manager of the Natural Disaster Mitigation Partnership, which is coordinating with national and international non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and donors to respond to the humanitarian emergency.

Inter-agency assessment teams made up of NGOs, UN agencies, and government experts were dispatched to the hardest hit provinces after the floods hit. At a meeting in Hanoi on 20 August the teams reported that most of the floodwaters had receded and short-term relief was getting to villages previously cut off from aid.

18,000 homes damaged

But in order to repair more than 18,000 damaged houses and clean out 19,000 hectares of rice fields, longer-term aid will be needed, stressed the assessment teams.

“The government has been very active in helping victims,” said Luu Quang Dai of the NGO Plan International who recently returned from surveying the damage in Phu Tho Province. “But the area is too much. It will take more than a year to recover. [In that time] many people will fall below the poverty line.”

There were also concerns that many children will not be able to attend school this autumn. The government said 165 classrooms had collapsed or were washed away. At least 100 more are filled with rocks and mud. The assessment teams said families devastated by the storm would also have a difficult time paying tuition fees or buying books.

Early warning systems

Heavy monsoon rains and flooding are a normal part of Vietnam's weather system. But extreme weather patterns in which storms are arriving earlier and lasting longer are having increasingly deadly effects, according to Vietnamese disaster preparedness officials.

In some areas, early warning systems have been installed to alert residents to evacuate. But when the waters rose, many of the alarms failed to go off.

"We do have some flood warning devices," said Le Thanh Du, deputy director of the Agriculture and Rural Department for Lao Cai Province. "It's just a pilot programme and it didn't work well. On that day, the electricity was cut off so the bell did not ring to warn the local people. I think if we have a comprehensive flood warning system, people living in flood areas could evacuate before the floods come."

Bracing for floods in south

As the northern provinces struggle to recover from the storm, 1,500km to the south, farmers in the Mekong Delta are bracing for a deluge of water dumped by the tropical storm days earlier in Laos and Cambodia. The water, which hit record levels in those countries, is flowing rapidly down the Mekong river into southern Vietnam.

“The water level is now at 3.3m and rising 7-8cm a day,” Nguyen Van Khang, director of Agriculture and Rural Development in Tien Giang Province, told IRIN on 23 August. “The biggest threat now is that the flood coming from upstream could be combined with high tides.”

Link to full article. May expire in future.

Ireland and Vietnam ink development deal

from the AFP

DUBLIN (AFP) — Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahern and his Vietnamese counterpart Nguyen Tan Dung signed a development cooperation accord in Dublin on Monday, a joint statement said.

Dung is on a three-day official visit to Ireland accompanied by a high level delegation, including senior government ministers and prominent business figures.

A joint statement heralded the first official visit by a Vietnamese head of government to Ireland and the first face-to-face discussions between the two as an "effective strengthening and deepening of Vietnam-Ireland relations."

Their talks also dealt with UN reform and human rights. Vietnam is a non-permanent member of the UN Security Council.

Ahern briefed Dung on a conference on cluster munitions which Dublin will host in May. He also paid tribute to Vietnam's success in reducing the poverty rate from 60 percent in 1993 to 15 percent last year.

Ireland has pledged over 87 million euros (133 million dollars) in overseas development aid to Vietnam in the period 2007-2010.

It has designated Vietnam as one of its priority countries for aid, with the focus on poverty reduction and improvement of health services.

The two premiers agreed to increase exchanges at ministerial level "to share the lessons learned in the development of Ireland's 'Celtic Tiger' economy, in particular Ireland's experience in attracting foreign investment and developing its education system."

Ahern also accepted an invitation to visit Vietnam at a date to be confirmed.

Poverty lingers in village left behind by Vietnam boom

from France 24

by Frank Zeller

Vietnam's cities are being transformed by rapid economic growth which has brought fashion boutiques, fast food and traffic jams, but most people in this remote northern village wouldn't know.

A rice farming hamlet of about 400 Tay ethnic minority people without telephones, television or even electricity, Na Lia is part of another Vietnam, the rural hinterland that is struggling to catch up with the boom.

Few people in Na Lia -- an hour's drive from the nearest highway in a valley in Lan Son province -- have seen Hanoi, where people bring laptops to wi-fi cafes and play the stock market.

One of the few villagers who has made the trip is Vi Van Phong, 31, who travelled to the capital for the first time this year, to visit the museum of Vietnam's first president Ho Chi Minh.

Back in the one-room house he shares with his mother, he says what most impressed him about Hanoi was electricity, but otherwise he didn't really like the big city.

Hanoi's once-sleepy streets are now choked with scooters and, increasingly, the luxury cars of the new rich, including several Humvees.

Phong, who like some 80 percent of the people of Na Lia does not own a moped, made the six-hour trip by motorcycle-taxi and bus for 12 dollars return, a small fortune for him.

Communist Vietnam is now on track to raise average per capita GDP to 1,000 dollars a year by 2010, moving the country of 84 million to middle-income status. Phong says he survives on less than 100 dollars a year.

For the most part, Na Lia is a small, cashless economy, where people live off what they can grow but lack surplus produce or the means to transport any excess to the nearest market town.

Rice grows in small paddies but the hills are denuded from erosion caused by slash-and-burn farming and felling of trees by villagers to sell for timber.

Like other villagers here, Phong says he runs out of rice for several months each year so must switch to corn and cassava. He eats meat or fish once or twice a month -- a far cry from Hanoi, where sushi bars have mushroomed, fast-food chain KFC opened its first outlets this year, and health authorities warn of rising obesity rates.

"There's a vast disparity between Vietnam's rural and urban areas," said Hassan Ahmad, whose Singapore-based group Lien Aid has launched an anti-poverty project here, funded by the city-state's Ian Ferguson Foundation.

"You see Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City -- bright lights, big cities -- but people here haven't tasted the economic growth yet," he told AFP.

"I wouldn't say it's the dark side of Vietnam, but here people say they suffer food shortages for three months a year."

Vietnam's government and its foreign donors are aware of the growing urban-rural divide, a problem common to much of Asia.

Asian Development Bank president Haruhiko Kuroda, at a Hanoi conference this year, warned that in Asia, "although absolute poverty is being significantly reduced, the gap between the poor and the rich is rising".

The World Bank and United Nations have often lauded Vietnam as a model partner which has lifted 30 million people out of abject poverty since the launch of doi moi (renewal) market reforms some 20 years ago.

Thanks to a decade of annual economic growth above seven percent, the ratio of the desperately poor has fallen below 20 percent, from nearly 60 percent in 1993, while national per capita GDP has risen to more than 700 dollars.

But the World Bank has also stressed that "the poverty rate among ethnic minorities and communities in mountainous areas is much higher compared to the national average," standing at 60 percent in 2004 for these groups.

Making a difference isn't always easy, but neither is it impossible, said Ahmad, speaking at the opening of a new primary school and library here, built as part of his group's first rural development project in Vietnam.

Not so long ago just getting water was a daily struggle in Na Lia, where people had to fill water buckets from nearby creeks.

Lien Aid has installed sand-filtered water tanks in all 71 households, fed via pipes from the nearby stream, where an eco-turbine generates power to light the new school, which replaces a dark timber shack.

Vietnamese agriculture experts have introduced soy beans and a high-yield rice, doubling output. They plan to soon buy a single bull to genetically improve the local livestock.

High-protein grass has been planted for the cows to feed on in enclosures -- increasing cattle yield, converting manure into organic fertiliser, and preventing the animals from destroying other plants.

At a nursery, seedlings have been planted for fast-growing acacia trees that will stabilise the hillsides and can later be sold as timber, said one of the group's agriculture experts, Cao Viet Hung.

The group plans to expand into orange, longan and lychee trees, to green the hills, improve the villagers' diets and earn cash.

"What we have done here is not genius, and it's not expensive," said Ahmad, whose project cost 150,000 dollars and half a year to set up, using know-how from Singapore's Nanyang Technological University.

"People from other villages have come to take a look," he said. "We believe this project can be replicated. The real needs in Vietnam are in places like this, beyond the mountains and at the ends of inaccessible roads."

Denmark Provides 61 Million DKK to Support Poverty Reduction in Vietnam

from Scand Asia

By Kittisak Siripornpitak

Denmark has joined other donors, together with the World Bank, to co-finance the sixth Poverty Reduction Support Credit (PRSC 6) worth totally 365 million US dollars to support the implementation of Socio-Economic Development Plan 2006-2010 in Vietnam which is the 1st operation in the second cycle of PRSC, which will last for five years.

Five operations (PRSC 1-5) have been implemented successfully in 2001-2006. PRSC operations are channelled directly to the government budget to support sustainable growth and poverty reduction.

Denmark has been co-financing PRSCs since it’s beginning in 2001. Its support to PRSC 6 is provided in recognition for the progress accomplished in policy reforms in Vietnam over the last year. Other co-financiers include ADB, Australia, Canada, Germany, the EC, Ireland, Japan, the Netherlands, the UK and Spain.

“PRSC 6 represents a very important milestone in Vietnam’s reforms towards a market economy and poverty reduction” said Mr. Ajay Chhibber, World Bank Country Director for Vietnam, “The credit will provide further support to Vietnam’s reform program.

These reforms in business and financial sector development, better governance and social inclusion are vital steps that Vietnam needs to become a middle-income country by 2010.”

PRSC 6 supports reforms in four important areas, which are business development, social inclusion, natural resources and modern governance.

World Bank grants major new loans to Vietnam

from Jurnalo

The World Bank plans to give Vietnam more than 4 billion dollars in interest-free loans through 2011 to help boost the country's fast-growing economy, the bank said Tuesday.

The aid of more than 800 million dollars a year will support Vietnam's five-year Socio-Economic Development Plan, which aims to reduce poverty and make Vietnam a middle-income country by 2010, a World Bank statement said.

The loan plan begins a country partnership strategy between Vietnam and the Washington-based development agency. The World Bank said it plans to focus on promoting business, environmental protection, social equality and governance.

The loans are to come from the International Development Association (IDA), the World Bank's credit arm for the poorest nations.

[Press Release] A Way Out of Poverty

from The World Bank

February 5, 2007—Hoang Van Lich once dreaded teaching when the sun wasn’t shining.

The fifth grade teacher’s primary school in Vietnam’s northern mountains region used to have no lights, no fans and a leaky tiled roof.

“When I came to teach at this school, most of the classrooms were in a temporary condition,” he says. “When it rained or got dark, there was nothing we could do but stand there watching.”

However Hoang Van Lich now never has to worry about the weather. His classroom with 23 children now has lights, ceiling fans and a secure roof.

The primary school of Tien Thang commune has 331 children in 16 classes from grades one to five. The school now boasts new classrooms built under funding from Northern Mountains Poverty Reduction Project.

Nearby 80 children at the La Thanh Kindergarten now also have a permanent home.

Surrounded by children from 24 months to five years old, head teacher Ma Thi Thu explains how the building of the kindergarten has brought the children together. “Before the kindergarten was built, we had to rent the houses in the communes and teach there,” she says. “There were seven classes, so we had to rent from the local families.”

In what is one of the poorest areas of Vietnam, some 75 village and primary school classrooms have been built under the project, bringing education to within one kilometer of almost 8000 families in this region.

Empowering Local Communities

The Northern Mountains project goes beyond just providing infrastructure. It’s also aimed at empowering the local communities in the region, one of the poorest in Vietnam. Fifteen percent of the total project cost of US$132 million goes direct to the communes – the lowest level of authority in Vietnam.

In a meeting room simply decorated with the national flag of Vietnam, commune leader, Li Minh Tan, describes how the project has impacted on the 4, 500 people in his commune.

“Before the Northern Mountains Poverty Reduction Project, the infrastructure in this area was rather different and so was the living condition of the people,” he says. “The poverty rate in the year 2002 was around 45%. Now it has reduced to 19.6%.

“We have to say that every year the project has helped reduce poverty in this commune by four or five percent.”

Li Minh Tan cites education as just one of the tangible benefits from the project, delivered to the children in nine villages in his commune.

“Before the school and the kindergarten were built, there was no class in the village near the centre of the commune,” he says. “The children had to learn in three shifts a day. Now the kids have much better conditions and can learn in their classes close to the village.”

Rain used to stop Dao Thi Ngat’s four children from making it to the classroom.
She lives in one of the poorest villages in the commune and makes a living growing rice and sweet potato.

Nowadays, her children can go to school all year round as a new road was built right near her home.

“In the past during the rainy season we had very difficult conditions so that the children cannot go to school and the women had to suffer a lot because we had to actually walk in the waters – go through the waters to get to the centre of the commune, “ she says.

Generating Income

But the road works has also generated money for local villagers in the commune. While an outside contractor was appointed for the road construction near Dao Thi Ngat’s home, part of the deal was local people should be hired.

The head of Rung Cheng village, Nguyen Quoc Huong, now has a job as supervisor and is responsible for checking materials. Fellow villagers work around him, earning about US$2 a day.

For him, the advantages of the project are simple: if the village men weren’t employed building this stretch of roadway he says, they would have to go away to other provinces or communes to earn money.

Since 2002, over 250 kilometers of rural roads have been built in the northern mountains region and are being used by more than 80,000 people.

Products to Market

In Tien Thang commune, the road construction now means local farmers have a way to get their products to market.

“Before the roads were built, there was no access for cars or trucks to come from the district to buy people’s agricultural products and so was very difficult for people to get access to the market and sell,” says Mi Minh Tan. “And that’s why the farmers had to suffer and sell their products at very low cheap products and took a lot of time and effort to take their goods to the market”

Farmers’ incomes have also been boosted by more than 80 small scale irrigation schemes bringing water to more than 1,300 hectares of land.

“In the past, the farmers could only really grow one crop a year,” says Luu Xuan Vuong, vice chair of the People’s Committee of the Yen The District, standing near a rice field and pointing to a reservoir in the distance.

“But with this new irrigation system, it helps bring enough water for them to grow three crops a year. In the past, there was not enough water so they couldn’t grow more than one and a half crops a year.”

The fact the canal system was requested by local farmers highlights a key element of the Northern Mountains Poverty Reduction Project – giving voice and power to people.

“I think the most successful achievement of this project is the capacity building for the local authorities and also raising the awareness and knowledge of the local people, says Luu Xuan Vuong, who’s also the vice director of the Northern Mountains Poverty Reduction Project in Yen The District.

Funding Direct to Communes

With the communes receiving about US$17 million out of the total project cost, it’s the local people who not only decide but manage the small scale projects, like roads, building small reservoirs, lining canal systems and even investing in village classrooms.

For these communes, it’s the first time they’ve had the opportunity to manage an investment budget. So far 368 communes in the northern mountains region have decided on 22 thousand projects.

Project director Madam Le Thi Thong, from Vietnam’s Ministry of Planning and Investment says the move in line with the government’s plans for decentralization.

Involved in the project since its inception, Madam Thong is clear about its benefits:
“The main values of this project are that it greatly benefits grassroots people and also facilitates the behavioral changes at a level never seen before.”