Viet Nam
I am currently serving as an international UN Youth Volunteer in Agricultural Economics with the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations in Hanoi, Viet Nam. I’m one of the six UN Youth Volunteers fully funded by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Czech Republic in 2017.
As many as 68 per cent of women and girls aged 15-49 in Asia and the Pacific face some form of violence in their lifetime. This is one of the highest levels reported in the world.
In an effort to fight high levels of youth exclusion and vulnerability in Viet Nam, the United Nations Volunteers (UNV) programme and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) partnered with the Vietnamese Central Committee of the Ho Chi Minh Youth Union (HCYU) in 2009 to create the Strengthening the Capacity of Volunteerism for Development in Viet Nam (VDVN) project.
26-year old Tran Van Chuong frequently awoke to the telltale sounds of his neighbour's wife being beaten by her husband. Their arguments would start quietly but escalate quickly as his neighbour turned to physical brutality, leaving his wife bruised and scraped. This was not an uncommon problem in their urban community in Da Nang, a major central Viet Nam port city of one million people.
World Health Day is the birthday of the World Health Organization (WHO) and a day that is close to Emmanuel Eraly's heart, as he has been involved in many campaigns to raise awareness of health issues in Viet Nam, where he worked for almost four years as a UNV intern and later as an international UN Volunteer supporting the communications function of WHO.
Hanoi, Viet Nam: When Leika Aruga (Japan) arrived at her duty station as a UN Volunteer Programme Specialist in Governance for UN Women in May 2014, it was a critical moment for women’s rights in Viet Nam. Little did she know how much she would use her training and background in international law to secure the inclusion of women's human rights in Vietnamese laws.
The first "Volunteer Talk -- UNV Knowledge Sharing Webinar" was organized on 21 May 2014 with the theme "Creating opportunities for volunteering". The webinar featured experiences in establishing Liberia's National Youth Volunteering Service (NYVS) and the Viet Nam Volunteer Information and Resource Centre (VVIRC). The guest speakers from Liberia were Eric Opoku, UNV Programme Officer and Isaac Bropheh, NYVS Programme Coordinator. The speakers from Viet Nam were Tran Thi Kim Chung, UNV Programme Assistant, Do Thi Kim Hoa, VVIRC Deputy Director and Do Thi Phuc, SJ Viet Nam Director.
Ha Noi, Viet Nam: I am currently working as a Capacity Building and Monitoring and Evaluation Officer for UNICEF in Ha Noi. I work for a programme called the Provincial Child Friendly Programme which aims to strengthen the capacities of Viet Nams provinces to tackle childrens issues. During the past years, the country has seen a huge wave of decentralization: the provinces now have more competencies, but often lack the capacity to consider children when implementing their plans and programmes.