Today was one of the most inspiring visits we have had. We got to visit the Vina Capital Foundation which was a charity organization dedicated to the betterment of Vietnam. It was nice to hear an older voice accepting the problems created by the older generations and also doing something to fix it. Mr. Rad Kivette clearly cared about the issues assailing rural Vietnam and that instilled hope for the world in me.

It was not only the quality of the programs that Vina Capital was doing, but also the scale that gave me hope. It seemed that they were focused on empowering minority women here in Vietnam and they had the data to prove it. Mr. Kivette told us about his programs to give heart surgery to babies from poor families born with congenital heart defects and then told us that most of those families made it to the middle class within five years.

Another of their programs was educating rural ethnic minority women on their legal rights. In the countryside, it is typical for a woman to be taken around the age of 13 and be made into a baby producing wife by a man, but Mr. Kivette’s team wants to stop this. His program is educating women in over one thousand high schools on their rights to not be taken by a man and to not be forced out of school.

With these methods, I appreciated how Mr. Kivette and his team worked with the government and the locals to figure out what worked to achieve their goals instead of just using an accepted method. We were told how he originally tried the “Western method” of giving scholarships to minority women to get a bachelors degree or higher, but then didn’t see those women returning to their villages to improve life there, so Vina pivoted. This is where the Vina Capital group has their methods difer from the West, they are going to remote places and educating women on what their rights are and helping save their children. In the West, most people already know their basic rights so they don’t need that special education and we are developed enough that most babies don’t die after birth.

I think this organization is the one I enjoyed visiting the most because of the work it is doing to improve the lives of some of the most repressed people. Their goal is also to improve the whole country by empowering these women because they believe that women need a seat at the table, which I agree with and cannot wait to see happen here in Vietnam and across the world.