First-hand account

France Hamel

DID posting in Vietnam from 2008 to 2010
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From 2008 to 2010, France Hamel was mandated by DID to coordinate a project designed to make intercoop services and transfers of funds available to the members of the Vietnamese financial cooperatives. This project is financed by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and is part of a vast program that also benefits microfinance networks in Haiti and three countries in West Africa.

"My family and I lived in Vietnam for two years working on the DID project entitled Rural-Urban Interconnectivity to Help Fight Poverty financed by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

As operations advisor, my mandate consisted of coordinating the introduction and deployment of two new services intended to improve access to quality financial services for members in 32 of the local financial cooperatives (called People’s Credit Funds or PCFs):

This vast cooperative network in Vietnam has 1,455,000 members through whom financial services benefit 4.8 million people in Vietnam. The network is made up of:

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In Vietnam, the cash economy is deeply rooted. People are used to paying cash for purchases and being paid their salaries in cash. Wishing to change this, in recent years the State Bank of Vietnam has made great efforts to introduce measures that would encourage a greater number of Vietnamese to make more use of banking services. One of these measures was to support microfinance by setting up savings and credit cooperatives known as People’s Credit Funds.

The introduction of the cooperatives in Vietnam proved to be highly pertinent for individuals in disadvantaged rural communities. It meant that they could finally open an account and use certain financial services at a reasonable cost, that is to say at less cost than at a commercial bank.

Since the objective of the project on which I worked was to increase the use of financial services in poor rural regions and offer the population better access to banking transactions, it was perfectly aligned with the objectives of the State Bank of Vietnam!

How did I do my part when I was in Vietnam? I did it by proudly representing the cooperative values of Desjardins and more specifically, by strengthening the network of People’s Credit Funds through the introduction of new financial services offered to local communities and members of the cooperatives. Now, thanks to these two new possibilities, the members of the cooperatives, especially in rural areas, can carry out their banking operations more easily, and do so anywhere in Vietnam!

And life in Vietnam? It is fine! My daughter Camille, who is 16, had the opportunity to attend the Lycée Français in Hanoi (the capital) for two years and make friends from all over the world! She has returned with many memories and contacts on MSN and hopes to see them again one day!

Her father Gaétan, as project head for a Canadian-Vietnamese firm, adapted to both work and life in Vietnam!

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The whole family particularly appreciated the kindness of the Vietnamese people, working and living with the rhythm of the seasons and the Buddhist religion, discovering the excellent local cuisine, early morning visits to the markets overflowing with fresh vegetables and fruit, and finally, admiring the magnificent scenery!

A closing anecdote! With a population of some 82 million inhabitants, Vietnam is undergoing effervescent economic growth. This has enabled numerous Vietnamese to purchase motorbikes... which has resulted in a lot of traffic and many traffic jams in the streets of the city.

This means of transportation has little room for baggage, leading the Vietnamese to become extremely inventive and to test both their sense of balance and the law of gravity! They regularly carry, with varying degrees of difficulty:

Which goes to show once again that Plato was right when he said: "Necessity is the mother of invention."