Skills training in Vietnam helps break the cycle of poverty

Plan Vietnam's vocational training programs have given people from poor backgrounds vital work skills to improve their future and break the cycle of poverty.

Plan’s Livelihood Advancement Business School (LABS) runs free courses in skills such as Information Technology (IT), customer relations, sales and marketing, and accountancy. It gives young people in particular the opportunity to learn a specialist talent to give them a brighter, more positive future. Two LABS graduates from Vietnam have hailed it as a life-changing experience:

Dinh Thi Loan, an adopted child from a poor, rural family, had been struggling for years to make a living in Hanoi after moving to the city after high school. She often worked 20 hours a day, seven days a week as a stone buffer, which left her hands bloody and sore and put just $30 in her pocket each month.

"Back then I was like an animal, not thinking, just doing, and running on pure adrenaline from one thing to the next," she recalled. "I had no hope for the future. I felt I was stuck in a trap and that the older I got, the fewer opportunities I would have."

Loan's fortunes changed however when she saw an advertisement for LABS, which had originally been set up in India in by the Dr Reddy Foundation and introduced to Vietnam by Plan in 2004.

Loan enrolled in an IT course that focused on office administration and was soon offered a position with the Vietnamese company, Viet Fast. She was promoted twice and now works as a sales coordinator for a distribution and investment company Phu Thai, earning almost seven times her salary as a stone buffer.

She said: "Words cannot express what LABS means to me. It has given me wings of hope and the foundations to make a decent life for myself."

Mother-of-two, To Thi Le Ninh, also benefited from LABS. After graduating from a hospitality course in Hue in 2006, Ninh now works as a housekeeper at the four-star Green Hotel. Ninh's schooling had ended when she was 15, when she went to DaNang to work as a tailor before returning to Hue to become a helper at the car factory where her father worked.

Ninh, who married at 18, was forced out of the family home when her father died and her stepmother took possession of the house and other assets, but her fortunes improved when she took the LABS course and quickly found employment afterwards.