The Countering Child Migration in Vietnam Project is designed to help children affected by the devastating 2020 floods in Vietnam. Child migration is one of the main consequences of a disaster in this region, which is exploited by crime syndicates for human trafficking.
Freedom in Disasters is working with the Blue Dragon Children’s Foundation to restore livelihoods and schools in the Hue province, which experienced a series of severe typhoons late 2020.
The Blue Dragon Children’s Foundation helps young people and families in Vietnam overcome crisis and build new lives. In Thua Thien-Hue province, an impoverished province in central coastal Vietnam, Blue Dragon is working on a comprehensive program to prevent the human trafficking and child labour. This province has in the past been a hotspot for child trafficking within Vietnam, with children being trafficked into exploitative labour in garment sweatshops in southern Vietnam.
In September/October 2020, this province was devastated by a series of severe typhoons that let to record breaking flooding. The destruction was widespread, and over 230 people killed. With the economic impacts on the province and on individual families being significant, it can be expected that families would again face difficulties in sending their kids to school and again be vulnerable to the tricks of traffickers offering ‘good’ jobs or vocational training.
Freedom in Disasters partnered with the Blue Dragon Children’s Foundation to restore livelihoods and schools, aimed at counteracting child migration, and therefore reducing the risk of child trafficking.
Freedom in Disasters is providing additional financial resources to restore livelihoods, schools and support local economic activity. This initiative is focused on the provision of financial resource to contribute to the Blue Dragon Children’s Foundation relief program. Please note that this initiative works in conjunction with another project that aims to evaluate this relief programming effort and assesses in how far it contributes to human trafficking prevention. For more details about this initiative, please visit this site.
If you would like to have a look at interviews from disaster relief recipients, please have a look at this video on our Freedom in Disasters YouTube channel.
To obtain more background information about human trafficking in Vietnam, have a look at the What makes People Vulnerable to Human Trafficking (Blue Dragon Children’s Foundation, 2021).
You might want to have a closer look at ‘The nature of Trafficking in Vietnam‘ (p. 20) or the ‘Part 4: Recommendations’ (p. 26) which unpack some misconceptions around human trafficking and offers insights for combatting this illicit trade in this part of the world.
This initiative was completed in December 2021.
What we have achieved:
In August 2021, Freedom in Disasters and the Blue Dragon Children’s Foundation formalised their partnership and agreed on joining forces to restore livelihoods, houses and schools.
After Freedom in Disasters provided additional funds for this initiative, the Blue Dragon Childrens Foundation commenced further relief work with the local community to realise this project.
Since September 2021 the restauration of livelihoods and schools continues to support vulnerable families and children in this province.
A detailed relief evaluation report was commissioned as part of a related Freedom in Disaster initiative, which is providing much insights to guide future counter human trafficking efforts in the Thien-Hue province and South East Asia in general.
We measured our impact by:
Freedom in Disasters is accountable to its partners, sponsors, the broader public, and most importantly those trapped in modern slavery. We ensure that our initiatives make an impact in the real world, and therefore design quantifiable solutions to combat human trafficking in disasters.
The Countering Child Migration in Vietnam Project impact measurements are occurring in the categories of:
- Successful transfer of financial resources to support local relief programs. Budget utilisation to stimulate economic activity, restore livelihoods and rebuild schools.
- Obtaining stakeholder interview footage, discussing the impact of disaster relief assistance
- Analytics of disaster relief assistance in relation to human trafficking as part of the Program Evaluation Report