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On August 29^th 2017, MCNV collaborated with the Village Health Workers’ Association of Quang Tri Province and the Youth Union of Huong Hoa District to organize a kickoff workshop for MCNV’s new project “Supporting Ethnic Minority Adolescent Girls”. Participating in the event were representatives of the Provincial Health Department, Provincial Sexual and Reproductive Health Centre, Committee for Ethnic Minority Affairs and the authority and relevant parties of the district, including People’s Committee, Health Department, Health Centre, Centre for Population and Family Planning, Department of Training and Education, Department of Labour, Invalid and Social Affairs, Department of Agriculture and Rural Development, Women’s Union and Youth Union, as well as international non-governmental organisations Plan and World Vision.

An assessment carried out by MCNV in collaboration with the Provincial Sexual and Reproductive Health Centre in the first half of 2017 has shown that ethnic minority adolescent girls in Huong Hoa are facing serious health, education and social problems. To evidence, in 2016 in Huong Hoa there were 301 girls out of totally 483 cases who became pregnant at adolescence (counted for 62.3% of the total number of pregnant adolescent girls in the province), 120 cases of child marriage, and 30% of adolescent girls under 15 years old and 50% under 16 started having sex. The ethnic minority adolescent girls lack knowledge and skills in SRHR, face difficulties in accessing quality health and education services, and are affected by local cultural customs and limited awareness of the community.

In 2017 and 2018, the project will be implemented in 6 communes in the border area Vietnam – Laos, including Huong Lap, Huong Phung, Huong Viet, Lao Bao, Tan Long and Tan Thanh. The project’s general objective is to reduce the rates of unwanted pregnancy and child marriage among adolescent girls. Key interventions will focus on (i) building capacity and creating opportunity for personal development for adolescent girls; (ii) improving the access to health, education and social services for adolescent girls; (iii) raising the local authority’s and people’s awareness about the issues related to adolescent girls. A wide range of activities have been planned, including a social marketing campaign for behaviour change communication, setting up clubs and groups of adolescent girls, checking up and counselling on SRH, providing scholarships and vocational trainings for disadvantaged adolescent girls, and improving SRH knowledge and skills for adolescent girls, thus contributing to ending unwanted pregnancy and child marriage among adolescent girls.

*Photo: Ms. Phan Thi Lien, Chair of the Village Health Association, Quang Tri province, was presenting the image and symbol of the project named Mun Arai.

On September 12, representatives from 7 MCNV funded community development funds in Phu Yen province together with MCNV staff visited and worked with the PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) team in Ho Chi Minh city. This meeting was the first step in which MCNV seek PwC’s expertise on financial management and legal consultation to help MCNV funded microfinance funds in Ben Tre, Quang Tri and Phu Yen province improve their technical and legal capacity to be self-sustained in development.

MCNV has been supporting social inclusion and health programs in these provinces for a long time and in each program, the microfinance component has been a glue and catalyst to connect target groups to participate and commit more to program objectives and at the same time, improve financial inclusion. MCNC’s target in the near future is to make these microfinance components to be independent funds to sustain themselves and continue to support the poor with minimum support from MCNV.

PwC is a renowned company in legal and financial consulting field. PwC had supported MCNV with CSR (corporate social responsibility) grants to improve education for children with disability. This time, PwC is interested to support this microfinance sector to make use of their in-depth expertise and also create opportunities for PwC staff to develop their capacity in a more challenging community microfinance environment.

MCNV and PwC will organize more discussions on cooperation in the coming time.

Working with PwC Sept 12 2017

Approaches & tools for writing stories and learning from practice

15 to 16 May 2017
International Institute of Social Studies (ISS), the Hague, Netherlands

Facilitated by the Barefoot Guide Connection – www.barefootguide.org
Based on the experience of facilitating Writeshops for the development of Barefoot Guides

How can social change and development practitioners write interesting and thoughtful stories and case studies, to learn from and to communicate to others? How can they do this in collective ways that improve reflection and learning practices? A “Writeshop” is a creative and disciplined method for reflection, learning and documenting stories that are worth sharing. This workshop offers training to facilitators to design and facilitate such Writeshops.

Social change and development organisations and practitioners struggle to tell and to learn from their own rich stories and to communicate these to others. The few tools they have, in the dry formats for reporting to donors, are usually too simplistic and dry. Through the collective processes of writing the Barefoot Guides (see www.barefootguide.org) we have developed an approach and tools that enable, encourage and support field practitioners to reflect on stories collectively and to become writers of their own stories. In Writeshops, practitioners write to learn, and learn to write.

Purpose

This is a two-day course for inhouse facilitators, who support, or wish to support, learning processes in their teams or organisations, using writing as an approach to collectively surface, deepen and share practices in any field of development or social change, including key experiences, lessons and implications for the future. From this it becomes possible to develop written products for wider education.

Who should participate?

This Writeshop is for practitioners who (wish to) facilitate collective learning and writing processes in the teams they work with. They should have some experience in small group facilitation.

Our Course Approach

The participants will take home ideas and skills of how to effectively use several writing process designs and tools, like the Action Learning Cycle, the Outside/Inside Story, Listening at Three Levels and Free-writing, f
ocused on helping others to write stories and case studies. They will also learn about how to help practitioners deal with writer’s block and to more effectively learn and co-write with their peers.

A detailed toolkit will be provided to each participant, in hard and soft copy, containing guidance and handouts for use in their own Writeshops.

The Facilitators

▪ Doug Reeler from the Community Development Resource Association (CDRA)
▪ Akke Schuurmans from MCNV
▪ Cristina Temmink, independent facilitator

The Date

15 to 16 May 2017

The Venue

Classroom 4.25
International Institute of Social Studies (ISS)
Kortenaerkade 12, 2518 AX Den Haag, Netherlands
Google Maps link

If you would like to participate please click on this link to register.

Fees

The fee is 400 Euro, payable on registration.

The earlybird fee is 350 Euro if paid by 15 April 2017.

The fee money can be paid to:
Account Holder: MCNV
Number: IBAN NL90 TRIO 0338 5367 60
Reference: Writeshop

Inexpensive lunches can be bought at the cafetaria. Lunch is not included in the fee.

In March 2017 a delegation of the Vietnamese Film Institute and the European Foundation Joris Ivens visited the MCNV office in Dong Ha. During the visit MCNV director Guus Paardekooper led the delegation around the MCNV Museum. The organisations plan a partnership in 2018, when MCNV celebrates its 50^th anniversary and the Joris Ivens Event will take place. The Dutch Ambassador Nienke Trooster, director Nguyen Dinh Thi of the Hanoi Academy of Theater and Cinema and Nuffic/ NL Universities are enthusiastic about the cultural exchange and like to join the cooperating partners.

The delegation from the Joris Ivens Institute was invited to Vietnam by the Vietnam Film Institute. Both institutes intend to start projects researching the Joris Ivens archive materials, such as films, scripts, photos and film posters. The results of this research could be presented in November 2018 during an international Joris Ivens Event in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City.

Joris Ivens in Vietnam

Film maker Joris Ivens worked in Vietnam between 1964 and 1970 on four movies, that play an important role in raising awareness of the Anti-War movement and their protest campaigns. Ivens arrived secretly in 1964 on invitation of the North-Vietnamese government. Two months later the USA started bombing the country. From the very beginning Ivens was in the unique position eye witnessing with his camera what he described as ‘the biggest colonial war the world ever has seen’. In two films unique excerpts can be seen of Ivens’ meetings in 1965 en 1968 with president Ho Chi Minh.

In the delegation also former MCNV’s Ad Spijkers, who was one of the driving forces behind the support actions to Vietnam, such as ‘Bikes for Vietnam’. He invited Jane Fonda, was involved in the visits of Kim Phuc to the Netherlands through the MCNV and of various Vietnamese professors, for instance the minister of Health Care.

With this visit of the Ivens Foundation to Vietnam a network of reliable stakeholders has been established, with whom the plans for 2018 will be worked out.

Read the full report of the visit of the delegation to the filming locations of Joris Ivens in Vietnam on www.ivens.nl

14^th April 2017, in collaboration with Hai Duong Medical and Technical University (HMTU), MCNV organized a workshop on introduction of Occupational Therapy (OT) Training Program for Bachelor level.

The workshop aims to increase general understanding about OT in contribution to quality of rehabilitation; to present and update progress of the OT education development project; and to introduce the pre-service training course of Bachelor of Rehabilitation specialized in OT at HMTU

80 physiotherapists and professors of rehabilitation profession from Ministry of Health (MOH), general hospitals, rehabilitation centers of Northern provinces, representatives from Ministry of Educational and Training (MOET), USAID and HI and especially lecturers and student of HMTU attended the workshop. All participants expected the BOT training program will be expressed broadly and recruit qualified students. The BOT training program at HMTU will be started this November. The same BOT course was kicked off already at the sister university of Medicine and Pharmacy in HCMC in March 2017.

Last Friday, May 12, 2017, the new ambassador of Vietnam in the Hague, Mrs Ngo Thi Hoa, visited MCNV office in Amsterdam. Mrs Hoa wants to intensify the relationship between Vietnam and the Netherlands, joining forces in collaboration. To realise this, she made a list of organisations to visit and MCNV was on the top of this list.

MCNV is member of the Barefoot Guide Alliance, an alliance of 6 organisations around the world, which are sustaining the Barefoot Guide Connection to spread its message and methods. The Barefoot Guide Connection is a global network of individuals and organisations that value deep reflection on development practices by and for practitioners. A method that has emerged from writing four Barefoot guides is the ‘Writeshopping for Development’ methodology.