Start date: October 2001
Expected end date: September 2015
Support Office: World Vision US and World Vision Taiwan
Location: Cam Thuy District, Thanh Hoa Province

Program background

Cam Thuy is a mountainous district in the west of Thanh Hoa province, located 70km from Thanh Hoa city and 140km from Hanoi, along Ho Chi Minh road. The district borders with Ba Thuoc district in the North, Yen Dinh and Vinh Loc districts in the south, Ngoc Lac district in the west and Thach Thanh district in the south.

Cam Thuy is in the climate zone 4 with 2 seasons: one hot season from April to mid- October and the other cold season. It is also influenced by the North climate resulted in transition between these two seasons. The average temperature is 23.3o C, average rain fall is 1711 mm and average humidity is 85.5%.

Cam Thuy is divided into a total of 20 administrative units (19 communes and 1 township), made up of 201 villages. The district occupies a land area of approximately 42,410 hectares (ha), including 10,382 ha of agricultural land and 6,625 ha of forestry land. Uncultivated land comprises 22,340 ha, of which 14,489 ha is bare-land. The district roads are still in poor condition and transportation from village to village is achieved through small trails along the mountains. The Ma River is a very important means of transportation in the district, especially for transporting forestry products.

Cam Thuy has a population of 110,250 made up of 23,546 households (an average of 4.7 people per household). Of the 25,370 women between the ages 15-49, 17,500 are married. There are 10,162 children under five. The population density is 345 people per square kilometre. Three ethnic groups live in the district, including the Muong (50%), Kinh (49%), and Dzao (1%).

Program description

Volunteers attended World Vision's training course on Early Childhood care and Development.

(1) program targeting: the program covered 18 out of 19 communes (and 1 township) in FY10 and 12 communes in FY11 which reduce the resources and efforts on the poorest. The revised design will focus on 9 poorest communes while the other 9 communes will still remain in the program but we will have plans for its phasing out. The target group of the ADP is the poor and sub-poor clarified by the MOLISA. Within this target group, the direct beneficiaries are mainly:

• Children (e.g. poor children, children with disabilities, children in especially difficult circumstances);
• Women (e.g. women who are primary income earners, pregnant and lactating women);
• Subsistence farmers (e.g. farmers who use traditional methods and inputs, farmers who have low yield, farmers who do not produce enough to feed their families);
• Families at risk (e.g. families affected by drought, families affected by typhoons, families with crop failure, families coping with disease);

(2) program management: The Village Development Board (VDB) needed to be further strengthened. Every staff in the program will be required to have dual roles as a sector specialist and at the same time, in charge of the entire commune development plan.
(3) program/project direction: The program/project direction will be further adjusted and be more focused on addressing the root cause of poverty.

Program development

Agriculture:
The ADP aims to increase incomes for the farmers in target communes. Poverty rate is high (28.86% in 2010s), most local people life based on agriculture production. Vietnam’s rural population depends to a great extent on subsistence agriculture. The ADP’s Rural Economic Development Project supports farmers increase their income through agriculture and non- agriculture activities. It also helps farmers to realise their rights for food and livelihoods by providing technical assistance and basic inputs.

Education

World Vision assisted local kindergartens to cook lunch for their students.

• Sponsorship project with Registered Children (RC) has built up passion, living skills and ambition as well as giving more care to surrounded people. Children become more active in their participation and have learned how to raise their opinions. The relationships between RCs and sponsors have been sustained well resulted in increases in number of RCs every year and thus helped to increase the budget of ADP.
• The registered children (RCs) are considered as the representatives of the community to maintain correspondence with the sponsors in the Support Countries in order to maintain the funds for the Area Development Program.
• ADP has focused on improving understanding of parents about sponsorship relation through campaigns taking place at hamlet level and made sure that correspondences between sponsored child and sponsors took place in time.
• The Project has helped to build up passion, living skills and ambition for RCs and children from the community. RCs thus have recognized the value of life that they have been experiencing and know how to share difficulties with peers.
• At the moment, Cam Thuy ADP has got 4,784 RCs, of whom, (2,000 RCs are sponsored by WV Taiwan and another 2,784 are supported by WV US.

Others

Beside the five projects described above, World Vision operates a number of special projects in the working site of Cam Thuy ADP. The projects are Mekong Delta Regional Trafficking Strategy (MDRTS), the Learn-IT project, the Disaster Mitigation project, the Medical Herb project and Microfinance (MFU).

Funded by World Vision Australia, the second phase of the MDRTS project targets at the Greater Mekong Sub-region countries. Its goal is to reduce the vulnerabilities to trafficking and increase the number of trafficking survivors who successfully recover from the harm experience.

The Microfinance Unit of World Vision’s National Office in Hanoi is carrying out an MED project in Cam Thuy. Although the two systems (the ADP and the MFU) are working independently regarding their staff, finance and management, both sides share interest. When coordinating with the MFU, the ADP is able to obtain goals of the livelihood project, i.e, to increase the income of the poor households in the target communes of the ADP.