On behalf of ActionAid Ireland, we extend our appreciation to the joint committee and, in particular, the Chairman and the clerk for inviting us. I would like to introduce my colleague, Mary O'Mahony, a trustee of the ActionAid Ireland board. We have prepared a brief presentation which I understand the committee has a copy of. We will provide some brief background information on the organisation and specific information on the work we undertake and support in Vietnam, both from our own publicly-raised funds and funding from Irish Aid.
ActionAid Ireland is an independent Irish non-governmental development organisation founded in 1984 with its own independent board of trustees. ActionAid Ireland raises its own funds in Ireland, principally through regular support from 7,500 donors via child and community sponsorship. ActionAid Ireland has received funding from Irish Aid since 1995 and is currently in receipt of three-year funding under the civil society scheme. I have attached an appendix setting out the funding we have received from Irish Aid for Vietnam to the back of the presentation.
We are a founding affiliate of ActionAid International, which has its headquarters in Johannesburg in South Africa. We work in 42 countries in Africa, Asia, the Americas and Europe. Our international strategic plan entitled "Rights to End Poverty" outlines the six key thematic areas in which we work in all of these countries. These are as follows: women's rights; the right to education; the right to food; the right to human security; the right to a life of dignity in the face of HIV and AIDS; and the right to just and democratic governance.
The focus of our work is on poor people and fighting poverty. Our approach is a rights-based approach to development where we try to enable poor people to fight for and gain their own rights. In each country, the country programme is managed and implemented by national staff and funded by the northern affiliates, official donors, trusts and foundations. Within this framework, ActionAid Ireland supports development work in four key partner country programmes — Kenya and Malawi in Africa and Vietnam and Nepal in Asia.
Much has been said about the context of working in Vietnam so I will not discuss this in any great detail. Suffice to say, development there is impressive. However, despite this impressive progress there are significant groups of poor and excluded people including women, children and ethnic minorities. There are widening disparities between people living in rural and urban areas and between the rich and the poor. It is these increasingly excluded groups on whom we focus in our work.
While mass organisations in Vietnam such as the Women's Union have been successful in providing services, they have not facilitated the development of civil society organisations that can influence government policy. The growth of civil society organisations has been slow to date and the focus has been also very much on service delivery but little has been done to tackle the underlying policy issues. It is hoped the new law on association will create a firm foundation for the development of member-based organisations. ActionAid Vietnam will work to support the development of locally-based civil society organisations, encouraging their participation in influencing policy and the empowerment of poor and excluded people.
There is also considerable corruption in Vietnam, particularly among government officials at local level. Government control of the media and civil society hinders the development of democracy. Therefore, supporting better governance is an important issue for non-governmental organisations.
ActionAid Vietnam was established and has been working in Vietnam since 1989. We currently work in 19 of the 64 provinces with a local staff of approximately 60 people. We concentrate on working in the most disadvantaged provinces with the rural and urban poor. We were the first international NGO to be given official government permission to work in the central highlands, the poorest and most isolated part of the country. We only received that permission this year.
ActionAid Vietnam focuses on a number of key development issues, namely women's rights, the right to just and democratic governance, the right to life and dignity in the face of HIV, food security and the right to education. This work is carried out in partnership with the most excluded groups including women and girls, ethnic minorities, poor farmers, rural-urban migrants and people living with HIV.
I will give some examples of our work there. In the case of women and girls, including trafficked women and children, we focus on tackling low pay, exploitation in factories, trafficking to nearby countries for forced labour and the sex industry, low access to education and proper health care, violence against women, the absence of women in decision-making roles and increased vulnerability to contracting HIV. In the case of ethnic minorities, who are among the poorest communities in Vietnam, they live in remote and mountainous provinces characterised by difficult natural conditions, geographical isolation and limited access to productive resources. Our focus here is on access to food, health and education.
With regard to rural poverty, around 90% of the poor in Vietnam live in rural areas. Our focus is on increasing access to food through increased control over production, resources such as seeds, land water and credit. For poor people living with HIV-AIDS, the focus is on preventing the spread of the disease and care and support for those who suffer from it. With rural-urban migrants, our emphasis is on combating exploitation in factories through raising awareness of workers' rights and entitlements.
ActionAid Ireland has supported development in Vietnam since 2004, providing particular support for education for ethnic minorities in the northern provinces, particularly in Ha Giang and Cao Bang, two of the poorest provinces in the country. The issue here is that the majority of Vietnamese people are known as Kinh and almost all of the trained teachers in the country come from this majority group. The problem in schools in the ethnic minority areas is that the children speak only their own ethnic language and the teachers speak only the majority language, Vietnamese. When children cannot understand what they are being taught or find it difficult to learn the majority language, they frequently give up. The work we support involves both providing teacher training for teachers from ethnic minority communities, providing ethnic minority language training for teachers from the Kinh majority, providing in-service training for school assistants and providing teaching materials for poor schools.
The work supported on women's rights sets out to raise women's awareness about their rights, create structures for women and men to get support at the community level to deal with domestic violence, provide information about trafficking and give support to women who have been trafficked as well as to sex workers. This work is very sensitive in Vietnam but it is very important as trafficking is on the increase.
The work with women factory workers has been very successful both in raising the awareness of employers about workers rights and supporting workers to claim their rights.
The Reflect methodology, based on Paolo Freire's literacy through practice, was originally designed by ActionAid. It is now used worldwide and has been very successful in Vietnam with the World Bank, GTZ and five major international NGOs all using the methodology. It is important that Reflect will be recognised officially so that it can be used widely throughout the country.
Funding from Irish Aid has enabled ActionAid Ireland to support some key development initiatives in Vietnam and both ActionAid Vietnam and ActionAid Ireland welcome the decision to establish an Irish Aid programme in the country and we look forward to working closely with Irish Aid on the ground. ActionAid Vietnam has already engaged with the Irish Aid programme and we are happy to be of further assistance in the future.
As part of its programme we would like Irish Aid to consider funding education in some of the ethnic minority areas as we consider education to be of key importance in the fight against poverty. Education requires considerable investment, much more than an NGO can provide so we would welcome Irish Aid input into this vital area of development. We also encourage Irish Aid to provide support to vulnerable women, both women in poor rural areas and also migrant women who are forced out of rural areas to work in very harsh conditions in factories in the cities. Governance and public accountability is an important national issue and one which Irish Aid is well placed to engage with.