Huyen Nguyen Thi (Mdev ’08) works for the ILO Country Office for Vietnam as a project coordinator. Since graduation, she has worked on issues related to local economic development, pro-poor tourism, informal employment and vocational training for rural workers. She is particularly interested in rural development and its relation to cooperatives and other social and solidarity economy enterprises.

Huyen has worked with cooperatives for over ten years. In Vietnam, cooperatives exist across a wide range of sectors, playing important roles in developing pro-poor tourism value chains which allow communities to join forces and provide services and products not only for the economic and social benefit but also for the preservation of the local culture. ILO Vietnam supports community-based tourism villages to organise as cooperatives, to improve their capacity to work with other business partners. ILO has also established a Vietnam Community-Based Tourism Network, of which Huyen is a co-founder.

Huyen believes that new cooperatives will emerge and develop rapidly in Vietnam, yet also sees challenges for Vietnamese cooperatives in their competiveness and capacity to connect with markets effectively. She hopes Vietnamese cooperatives will be able to open up to collaborate with cooperatives in other countries to become independent from export companies.
Read more about Huyen’s work on the ILO website.