The year 2008 marked the twentieth anniversary of East Meets West in Vietnam. It was also the end of one era, and the start of another. Our accomplishments in 2008 were impressive, and our last two decades have led to four big trends that are having a profound impact on the work the East Meets West Foundation is performing.
The first is the transition of East Meets West to a truly national organization. Our work has expanded beyond central Vietnam. This process started three years ago, when EMW opened an office in Hanoi under the leadership of Program Development Director Nguyen Thi Minh Thu. The Hanoi office is now the national office of EMW in Vietnam, and we have hired a new Country Director, Minh Chau Nguyen, to lead all our Vietnam work from that office. Our former Country Director, Mark Conroy, who has been an essential part of building EMW, is still on staff, working as a senior advisor in the Da Nang office.
But this is not only a geographic shift—moving our representative office to Hanoi has strategically placed us in a better position to enact change in Vietnam and the region. EMW has started to take a prominent role in national organizations based out of Hanoi: groups like the NGO Working Group on Climate Change, the National Rural Water Supply and Sanitation Partnership and the NGO Water and Sanitation Working Group. Several of our key programs are now run from Hanoi.
That leads to the second big trend happening now, which is that EMW is taking a regional approach to international development, moving us beyond the borders of Vietnam. As Vietnam develops, there are opportunities to take what we have learned here and apply it to neighboring countries. In 2008, EMW opened projects in Cambodia, Laos and East Timor. Our first program to be exported is Breath of Life; others will follow in 2009 and 2010. In a key departure from the way that most large international NGOs work, EMW is driving this expansion from inside Vietnam, and using our resources here to support the regional expansion. Doctors and nurses from Laos and Cambodia, for example, are being trained at hospitals in Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi.
The third big trend is towards an ever-higher level of sophistication and strategic complexity in our program work. While we still do a lot of the basic work of humanitarian development – building schools, assisting children with congenital heart disease – most of our programs have evolved into models of what government agencies themselves should be doing in Vietnam and other countries. I don’t mean taking care of poor patients; it goes without saying that all countries should provide medical,educational and social services to as many people as possible, and that all the NGOs in the world cannot make up for a basic lack of government services.
Instead, what East Meets West is doing is creating and testing models for how to deliver high-quality, high-impact programs. In a number of areas – clean water supply and sanitation, neonatology, pediatric cardiology, dentistry, support services for the disabled and education for children from disadvantaged families – the EMW model has become the standard by which other programs, whether government or NGO, can be evaluated. Our goal is to make our core programs the best possible in Vietnam, so they can serve as the template for how our partners in the government and civil society can implement their own programs.
The fourth and final big trend is just emerging, and this is adaptation to climate change. That climate change is happening is by now indisputable; that something needs to be done about it blindingly obvious. But what can a country like Vietnam, with so much of its territory at severe risk from floods, storms and other negative effects, actually do? To wait for the major greenhouse-gas emitting countries to solve the problem is no solution at all. Even if drastic action were taken immediately, seas and temperatures would continue to rise for decades to come. What East Meet West is proposing instead is to transform our development work in at-risk communities into a program to help them become more resilient to climate change using techniques and technologies that are affordable, effective and available right now. We call this “climateproofing” for poor and vulnerable communities. This means a comprehensive evaluation of vulnerabilities combined with suggested solutions and an active program of environmentally-sustainable livelihood development.
Climate change adaptation is going to be a major focus of development work over the next ten years, and Southeast Asia needs a great deal of attention in this area. If EMW is successful, this too can become a regional model for development work done at the highest level.
The end of one era is always the start of another one. For East Meets West, this will mean moving in new and exciting directions, and we hope you will join us on that voyage.
With warmest regards,
John Anner
Executive Director & President