Serving Ho Chi Minh City
Like Eden, the Taiwan Fund for Children and Families provides services to children. However, TFCF didn’t set up shop in Ho Chi Minh City until September 2015.
Established in 1950, TFCF has in recent years been extending its operations overseas. In fact, its move into Vietnam was its fourth foreign venture, following forays into Mongolia, Kyrgyzstan, and Swaziland.
Frank Chung, TFCF’s Vietnam representative, says that TFCF serves the same people in Vietnam that it does in Taiwan: poor children. However, the different environment results in a very different approach to those services.
TFCF finds Taiwanese sponsors to donate NT$700 per month to support the education of poor Vietnamese children. After accounting for currency exchange fees, sponsored children receive about US$16.80 per month to support their educations. Chung says that while this amount won’t cover a family’s expenses in Ho Chi Minh City, it will pay a child’s tuition.
As of the end of 2015, TFCF was helping 623 Vietnamese students and had another 70-some kids on a list of those waiting for sponsors.
“Poverty has many faces.” Chung notes that poverty is widespread in rural Vietnam because there is little development and few jobs. But children in Ho Chi Minh City, which has a large population of migrants from the countryside, are more likely to be poor because they are being raised in a single-parent family or by their grandparents. “Rural migrants don’t have household registrations, so their children don’t appear on school rolls. In fact, they are unable to enroll in public schools.”
Dee Deng, a child poverty researcher with TFCF in Vietnam, observes that nearly 60% of childhood poverty is the result of growing up in a single-parent household or in a household with several children. “All the clients we’ve been dealing with lately are teen fathers and teen mothers who don’t have much education and are incapable of taking care of children. Such couples are prone to divorcing and becoming single parents,” says Deng.
The restrictions the Vietnamese government places on the activities of NGOs make it necessary for them to seek a local partner (usually a local non-profit or the local government) to deliver services. In TFCF’s case, its local partner provides documentation on kids, which TFCF then screens to find candidates meeting its criteria.
“In Taiwan, TFCF can tailor its services to students in all kinds of situations. In Vietnam, we have to go about providing services indirectly. It’s more like charity work than social work,” explains Chung.
Though severely constrained, TFCF has been actively training and guiding seven local social workers, working with them to deliver and even expand its services. This year, TFCF plans to apply to extend the scope of its operations southwards, and is considering providing services everywhere within an hour or two’s drive south of Ho Chi Minh City.
The Taiwan Fund for Children and Families’ core mission is helping children get an education. (courtesy of TFCF)