Hello and welcome to the Sunday show, our biggest feature of the week on Voice of Vietnam Radio showcasing Vietnam’s traditional culture, hospitable people,beautiful landscapes and more. I’m…… I’ll be hosting the show today, and I hope you enjoy it.   

People with disabilities are an important social issue in Vietnam. According to government statistics, as of 2003, there were more than 5 million people with disabilities (PWD) in Vietnam, accounting for 6.3 percent of the total population. Up to 80 percent of PWD are dependent on support from their family or social assistance provided by the state and/or community. Jobs for PWD have always been top public concerns. In today’s show, we’ll spotlight efforts to integrate people with disabilities in Vietnam into the labour market.

The Donkey Bakery in Hanoi’s business district Ciputra. It’s a busy day, the hotline keeps ringing. Australian volunteer Monica is passing on yet another order for a sandwich to the three young women behind the counter. She’s using her voice and hands to communicate with them. The Donkey Bakery is different from other bakeries. Most staff here are hearing impaired.

Donkey Bakery

Two young ladies in their twenties are preparing a sandwich with tomatoes, home-made ciabatta bread and beef. A delivery boy, who is hearing impaired, grabs the bag together with the note with the address, gets on his motorbike and drives off. Mark Stanford-Kroese is the founder of the bakery:“70 percent of our sales is being delivered. So our delivery boys they deliver throughout Hanoi. First when we started this our friends said well you guys are crazy because they cannot communicate, they cannot find the road. So it took a bit of time to get this running, but now it works. And our top deliverers are now our bakers. So we try to give them different jobs and to see where they’re good.”

The Donkey Bakery was set up in August 2009. It started off by selling donuts, but now it also offers self-made German bread and French croissants. It caters to embassies and foreign companies, but customers can also come into the shop directly. Demand keeps growing also with Vietnamese customers. Today, some 15 people work at the bakery.

Mark and Monica

Another 25 staff are employed in the tailor factory which is also part of the Donkey business. 80 percent of all their staff have some form of disability, only 20 percent don’t. Stanford Kroese explains the concept:“The mission is to create an environment for disabled people, give them respectful jobs and let them be part of… We run this as a family business… let them be part of the complete process, the success. Our employees come from the lower social environment, most of them are hearing impaired, some of them don’t even write and read and the mission is to give them vocational training and let them be part of the process of what they’re producing.”

Employees are often shy when they first arrive because of their lack of experience in the workspace, says Stanford-Kroese. But it’s not the degree of experience that is the decisive factor when it comes to employing someone: It’s their motivation together with an eagerness to learn and to change, says Mark Stanford-Kroese: “So if you compare our company with another company employing disabled people we give them a soul, let them experience what they can really do and what they like. They not only get vocational training, they get personal life skills training, hygiene, behaviour, so we train our service people to serve and smile and have contact with customers. This works very well. They’re really integrated.”

The staff’s motivation is high, customers are satisfied with the quality of the products, and so demand has been increasing fast.

So much so that the Donkey business is currently in the process of moving into bigger premises. In the middle of a building site, daily work has to go on, also in the sewing section.

Luyen Shell is in charge of making sure everything runs smoothly. She’s talking and using gestures and facial expressions to communicate with her employees. Nguyen Thi Quyen from Hai Duong province is cutting cloth for an evening gown that’s been ordered by an ambassador’s wife. “Being disabled, I always think people like me should get a suitable job to earn a living on my own. I was introduced to work here with Ms. Luyen through a project of the Red Cross Society and have been working here for more than 5 years. In the past I did not think that I could work as other normal people but since I came here, people have been so nice to us and helped us alot. Everyone has his own dream, for me, I consider this is my home and just want it to develop further and further and we can stay here forever.

Nguyen Thi Quyen at work

Most of the staff with disabilities stay with the company after they’ve been trained, says Stanford-Kroese. That’s rare in Vietnam, where wages are generally still low and employees quickly look for better paid jobs once they’ve been trained. For him as an employer, his staff’s loyalty means hard cash: He doesn’t lose money on having to train new people every couple of months, like other Vietnamese companies. Stanford-Kroese enjoys the fact that he’s working for a good cause, he says, but primarily he is a businessman: “This operation is based on a for-profit model. We believe in sustainable development which is based on a for-profit model. Charity makes maybe an organisation lazy. If it’s your own money you really try to manage it as best as possible and on the sewing side we’re competing with other companies. We’re delivering to the top hotels in Vietnam and it just gives our employees a much more, they feel much more part of the society because they’re considered like any other company competing in this environment.”

Huyen Nguyen from the Vietnam Assistance for the Handicapped VNAH shares the same opinion. VNAH set up BREC, which stands for Blue Ribbon Employers Council, an initiative to give people with disabilities access to what Huyen calls “normal” jobs: “That’s the reason why we set up BREC. We don’t want to separate PWD in separate areas. we want to mainstream – that’s the word we’re using – PWD into the labour market. We don’t want PWD just focus on doing painting or handicraft in separate areas. We want them to be included in the general environment. That’s the purpose of BREC.”

BREC serves as a forum where employers like the Donkey bakery owner Mark Stanford-Kroese can enter into dialogue with other non-charity businesses who are contemplating hiring people with disabilities. It also serves as a recruitment platform - people with disabilities can upload their CVs, companies can upload vacancies.

What’s stopping most employers outside the charity or handicraft sector from employing people with disabilities so far is generally the lack of education, says Nguyen Hong Oanh. Most kindergartens and schools in Vietnam are not equipped for catering to special needs yet. Special education classes are rare. And: it’s a vicious cycle: disabilities lead to poverty, poverty worsens disabilities. Parents have to stay at home with their child, can’t work, and therefore have even less money to pay expenses such as school fees.

So there are still a lot of barriers within the Vietnamese society that need to be overcome, says Nguyen Hong Oanh. She’s the director of IDEA, a Vietnamese NGO, that has been lobbying hard for people with disabilities: “It’s important for people with disabilities to have a job. But so far, it’s difficult for them to get one, especially a good one. First of all the level of knowledge and education of people with disabilities is generally not high. Secondly, most of them are struggling just getting by in their daily lives already, and thirdly, employers think if they hire a person with a disability they’re not hiring the best candidate. They also think it requires changing location to cater for the needs of PWD and that they have to pay a lot of money. That’s something they simply don’t want.”

IDEA was one of the main driving forces behind the law on disabilities which the Vietnamese government passed last year. It came into effect mid this year, guaranteeing people with disabilities access to education, work, public transport, etc...

Nguyen Van Thanh says the law is somewhat a climax in a long effort by the Vietnamese government to improve living conditions for people with disabilities in Vietnam. He works for Vietnam Association of Business and Enterprises of persons with disabilities – VABED: “The government has made a lot of efforts to support disabled people, as far as both their material and their spiritual lives are concerned. It has issued many legal documents and decrees. The Ordinance on Disabled People for instance was passed in 1998. And now, in June 2010 the National Assembly approved the Law on Disabled people. It comes into effect on January 1^st 2011. Through this Law, I believe these people will be cared for better than they are now.”

And the Vietnamese government has been active in many fields already: wheelchair ramps have been built at airports and in public buildings. They’re even thinking about introducing a quota for people with disabilities in enterprises. But most importantly, says Nguyen Hong Oanh, society’s attitude towards people with disabilities has to change: “I think after we have the law on PWD not just the PWD but also people without disabilities will understand the abilities of PWD and they will also acknowledge their rights. And if we have a special supervising body in place to implement the law then life for PWD will be improving.”

But implementation of the law is not easy, says Pham Thuy from VIETCOT. VIETCOT is the Vietnamese Training Centre for Orthopaedic Technologists with the aim to train new students and professionally upgrade qualified orthopaedic technologists in preparation for their assignments in Orthopedic Rehabilitation Centers. Many local authorities in the provinces simply lack the resources to implement the plans drafted by the central government in Hanoi. Thuy says: “The state has actually done a lot already in terms of laws and regulations but every province has to implement them in their own detailed form. They have to come up with their very own action plan. So in the province of Thanh Hoa for instance this action plan doesn’t exist yet although it should. Simply because Thanh Hoa doesn’t have the money. So we may have great regulations in place, but there is a considerable lack of money. Unfortunately that’s the reality.”

Roughly one in ten Vietnamese has some form of disability, according to estimates. More than two thirds of them could potentially work. But a mere 3 percent actually have a job.

Nguyen Hong Oanh is one of them. She herself runs the NGO IDEA from a wheelchair. She says people with disabilities will also have to work on themselves to become more self-confident and to start claiming their rights. “I hope in the future the law on PWD will be a reality for the PWD in their real lives. And I hope that people will understand the law and behave accordingly. I hope that life for PWD in Vietnam will be better than now. And that PWD and people without disability will be equal, that they will also get good jobs and that many businesses will open their doors for them.”

This vision has already become a reality at Donkey Bakery. Their next idea: they want to train new people to answer the telephone hotline. Blind people would be perfect for the job, says Mark Stanford-Kroese. And the Donkey business could do with some more staff. The phone just won’t stop ringing.

You’ve been listening to the Sunday Show on the Voice of Vietnam. In this week’s edition, we spotlighted efforts to integrate people with disabilities in Vietnam into the labour market. Next week, we’ll give you an in-depth look at the Social Risk Fund, a new model to reduce poverty in the northern province of Thanh Hoa. See you again next Sunday for another edition of the Sunday Show on the Voice of Vietnam. I’m.......thanks for your attention, Good-bye!