Following is the full text of the interview. 

VOVNews: Could you brief us about UNV activities in Vietnam in the past 16 years?

Ms Ida Munck: UNV activities began in Vietnam in 1990 but the organization has experienced dramatic changes over the past 16 years. Initially, we only recruited international volunteers mostly working with UN agencies. In 2001 the UN launched the International Year of Volunteers and started a programme to recruit national volunteers. Today the number of national volunteers is actually larger than that of international volunteers. We are very happy about this development. We are not only working with UN agencies, but also recruiting volunteers for national counterparts for example the Ministry of Planning and Investment and the Ministry of Labour, Invalids and Social Affairs, as well as other social organisations such as the Vietnam Women Union and the Vietnam Youth Union, to name a few.

VOVNews: What are challenges facing UNV in Vietnam and how to address them?

VOVNews: UNV has helped expand the volunteer network in the country, by providing training for Vietnamese volunteers. Could you give any assessments of the results of this activity?

Ms Ida Munck: Vietnamese youngsters are motivated volunteers and they have a high level of education. Our experience of working with the Vietnamese volunteers is to develop their capacity and it has been very successful. One of the objectives of the volunteer training is to ensure the sustainability of volunteer programmes. The way we have done that is we have trained national UNV or UN volunteers in how to recruit, train and manage volunteers so that they can do the same with others. For example, we developed the Youth Volunteers in Cultural Heritage Preservation Project, in which volunteers were trained in how to look after these sites and how to encourage other people to volunteer for the World Heritage Areas protection. With only one international volunteer at the beginning, five national volunteers were trained and now the number of volunteers working on this project has increased to hundreds after two years.

We are doing the same with a project managed by Vietnam Women’s Union to raise the involvement of people living with HIV/AIDS. In this project, national volunteers (some of them are people who live with HIV/AIDS) train other people living with HIV/AIDS in how to advocate for services and raise their awareness. And they train new volunteers. It is our aim to promote the sustainability through the training of volunteers.   

VOVNews: What are your future programmes in Vietnam?

Ms Ida Munck: We are working towards helping Vietnam reach the eight Millennium Development Goals. We are working in certain areas and connected to HIV and youth, youth and employment, and education. For youth employment, we are working with the Ba Vi rehabilitation centre No. 2 (to provide vocational training for the centre’s residents), the GIPA (Greater involvement of People Living With AIDS) project with the Women’s Union’s. We are collaborating with UNESCO and the Youth Union for a project called ICT for Education at Community Learning Centres to help people living in remote and rural areas get easy access to ICT. On the environment, we are in the process of developing a project with the UNESCO and the Youth Union to preserve environmental sites along the coast of Vietnam. We will also continue to post volunteers in the different UN agencies.

VOVNews: Which volunteer programmes have impressed you most?

Ms Ida Munck: I admire a group of Vietnamese volunteers who live with HIV/AIDS in a Women’s Union project to promote greater involvement of people living with HIV/AIDS. They are open about their status, they are courageous and they show society that people living with HIV are normal people, good people and still benefit to society. 

VOVNews: What will we do to maintain and promote voluntary activities in Vietnam?

Ms Ida Munck: Voluntarism in Vietnam is well organised because it had existed long before UNV came to Vietnam. It is appreciated, well understood and developed. Young people are especially proud of volunteering and do so freely. You have a group of young people very highly educated and in many ways very motivated for volunteering. I think it is important to raise the awareness about the importance of volunteerism through the whole society, Government agencies, the community, business circles and int’l partners because volunteerism is an essential part of achieving MDGs. I think UN goes forwards with a very successful example there. UN promotes volunteerism in all its programmes. 

VOVNews: Thank you very much.