During a visit to Viet Nam, REDAA’s senior communications officer, Georgina Diaz Ibarz met with her counterpart at ICRAF Viet Nam, Minh Nguyen, to chat about the challenges of communicating with remote communities and the plans he is putting in place to achieve key goals.
This project is applying context-specific agroforestry practices and improved value chains in the Bắc Hà district of the Northern mountains of Viet Nam.
- What's your number one priority as a communications officer?
My top priority is ensuring that the knowledge created by the project reaches the community in accessible language. This isn't just for those who understand the official language in Viet Nam but also for people within the community who may not speak or read Vietnamese well or those who don’t have the scientific background to understand the knowledge.
- What is the knowledge created by the project?
The knowledge focuses on supporting research and action to address land degradation in Bắc Hà district, Lào Cai province, and strengthen climate resilience to enable people to thrive in harmony with nature. It involves both scientific knowledge and local knowledge, which is crucial for researchers from other places to understand how people here develop agricultural activities or cope with climate change in their own ways, without relying on scientific information.
It's a two-way exchange. Each person in a community has some knowledge about agriculture, but they often lack a systematic approach to learning from others in the same commune.
- How are you planning to achieve that?
So my overarching goal is to support the project activity – that is help strengthen farmers’ capacities to develop new income-generation activities and improve value chains.
A long-term approach focusing on livelihoods is essential because it’s important to the local people. You've seen how much they care about having a sustainable livelihood. When farmers see tangible benefits from the project, they start believing that the approach we're promoting is the right one. By supporting their livelihoods, we can help them spread good practices that improve soil health and ultimately contribute to nature restoration and reducing land degradation.
- Yes, the community we visited was very vulnerable financially and improving livelihoods seemed the main concern.
Now the thing is, if you’re poor, your priority is to earn money to escape poverty. You’re not going to care about climate change if you don’t have food for tomorrow.
So, aligning the project goals with people’s real-life challenges means harmonising their livelihoods with the project’s objectives. Without the support of the local community, it’s impossible to succeed. Through activities that support livelihoods, we can gradually help them see the bigger picture.
- What’s another challenge you’ve encountered? Language must be a huge barrier since some farmers don’t speak fluent Vietnamese and speak other vernacular languages.
Yes, language skills vary in the community. Young people speak Vietnamese fluently, but the older generation hardly understands it. Ethnic minorities in Bac Ha speak H’mong, Tay and Nong, which don't have a written form.
- What does it mean for you and your role?
Well, as a Vietnamese, I don't speak these languages and the only way that I can work hand-in-hand with those who don’t speak Vietnamese is through an interpreter. So a lot can be missed and lost in translation.
But it’s not just the language. Many elder farmers didn’t complete secondary school – unlike the younger generations – so understanding complex issues like soil degradation is difficult without the scientific base.
To communicate these topics, we have to translate complex terms into something relatable, using concepts that are close to their daily life. For example, we wouldn’t say ‘soil health’, we would say “when you plant a tree on your home garden, that soil will affect the tree in a positive or negative way.” So instead of using a scientific or global term, it’s about breaking down concepts into everyday language that they can digest.
- How are you addressing these language and cultural barriers?
We strive to use a participatory approach to co-produce materials. For example, we plan to create a series of videos with technical guidelines for how to care for specific fruit trees. We have the scientific knowledge for this but we invite villagers who speak both Vietnamese and the local language to help produce the voiceover. We’ll also design accessible graphics and share them via Zalo, a popular chat app in Viet Nam, so people can watch the visuals while listening to the audio in their language.
It’s important to talk to scientists first and get them to explain their findings in simple language. Then, I talk to the farmers and see if they understand it. It’s about translating complex concepts into their own terms – not just the language, but their way of understanding.
- The project also aims to use agroclimatic information services (ACIS) to help farmers prepare for extreme weather events. This sounds like complex data too, right?
Even highly educated people find the ACIS system hard to understand. If I were a farmer, I wouldn’t read the reports because they are too detailed and lack graphics. Generally, farmers don’t care too much about exact measurements – they just want to know when there’s a high chance of rain or unusual weather events.
After the ACIS training [to ensure farmers can read and understand these reports], I plan to conduct a survey to understand what information farmers found most useful. Based on that, I can tailor the information to their needs.
- Working with local partners is important too.
Absolutely. ICRAF has been working in Viet Nam since 2007, so we have a broad network of local partners. It’s essential to work with trusted local organisations because they have established relationships with communities over the years.
For example, for this project, we partner with The Farmers’ Union of Lao Cai. It’s a great example of a good collaboration between a Vietnamese provincial organisation and the project team can work together in an international programme because they are very close to the local community. A farmer representative from each commune is part of the Union and helps liaise between the two.
- In terms of your job, what do you need to make your work easier and achieve your goals?
Lets’ see… I think it’s great that communications is a big part of the REDAA projects. It’s nice to have that space and support. But, as a comms person, I think, generally, nature restoration projects should allocate more financial resources for communication products. If you want well-produced materials, you need the funding to support that.
Ideally, there would be a guideline from REDAA specifying what percentage of the budget should go towards communications. During the communications training course, many colleagues mentioned they needed more resources. Of course, it depends on the programme's priorities, but having dedicated funding would be incredibly helpful for communications at the country level.
- I agree a hundred percent! Comms is always the one thing that gets forgotten. And all the more reason why it’s been great to talk to you - thanks very much.