BACKGROUND
Entrepreneurship is about leadership, innovatively, creativity and about envisioning and exploiting possibilities. Several programs have shown the positive influence of entrepreneurship on poor and marginalised people. When they find ways of earning money they feel respected, it helps them to get into daily routines, and it makes them proud to be able to contribute money to their families and communities. The development of different types of Community managed Development Funds combined with entrepreneurship trainings and trainings on financial literacy, have already assisted thousands of people to improve their living conditions. MCNV plans to increase activities in the field of entrepreneurship especially in Vietnam.
MCNV’S RESPONSES
The market economy offers a proportion of marginalized people chances to escape their poverty. However, many face barriers of access, lack necessary capabilities or do not recognize, or even believe, that they have chances. For this reason it is important for MCNV to study and take into account how local market systems work and identify barriers and facilitators for access by marginalized groups. The work with market systems takes various forms in different programs/projects, and at different levels of development.
Almost all ethnic minorities were dependent on self-subsistence farming and have increasingly come into contact with ‘the markets’. First the traders came via the new roads (opened for ‘development’) to them from elsewhere to buy agricultural products at the farm gate. But after that these traders established shops right in the farmers’ communities and used their knowledge and networks to become ‘middlemen’ between the local producers and outside markets. The impact of these middlemen is manifold: on the one hand they help poor farmers creating new sources of income, new crops and agricultural knowledge, but on the other hand it is in their interest to keep the farmers dependent on them, for instance via debt traps and protecting their local monopolies. In the Community-Managed Health and Livelihood Development project in Khanh Hoa province (2004-2016), MCNV has worked long with ethnic minority communities to help them increase their aspiration, self-confidence and knowledge and to gradually reduce their dependencies on the middlemen, as well as on the local government.
A next step in ‘working with the market to alleviate marginalisation and poverty’ is best illustrated by MCNV’s Microfinance projects, such as that managed by the Women’s Union in Ben Tre, where poor women groups learn to save and invest money to set up and grow small businesses. Basic “financial literacy” is often lacking among the marginalised target groups and therefore MCNV is building this capacity among many groups, like for Disabled People’s Organisations to know how they could act best to maintain and gradually grow their Revolving Funds.
Future plan
Many further steps are needed to make the market work best for the poor. A large majority of Vietnamese farmers are small-holder farmers who certainly do not lack entrepreneurship or financial literacy, but they are poorly organised, which significantly decreases the influence and the “Value Chains” of their products. In Quang Tri province, Vietnam, MCNV is developing relationships with farmer’s cooperatives, and agricultural producer groups. In the near future, MCNV intends to link these initiatives to farmer groups and value chain development in neighbouring area’s in Lao PDR, thus enhancing cross-border value chain development.
