Enhancing Capacities to Engender Research for Sustainable Development in Vietnam, 1999–2009

Abstract

At the turn of the century, Vietnamese universities, research centres, and researchers, especially younger generations of intellectuals, had few capacities to design and undertake social and gender-sensitive analyses as required for development interventions and policies. Within this context, Vietnamese and Canadian researchers collaborated to develop ‘Enhancing Capacity to Engender Research,’ a 10-year project (of three interrelated phases) to enhance the ability of Vietnamese researchers to generate, implement, and disseminate knowledge about the gendered nature of social change in Vietnam. After experimenting, during phase I, with small-scale individual research, participants produced in teams, during phase II, three research reports on small-scale exploratory research projects addressing socially relevant questions. The research documents crucial aspects of Vietnamese development today: the impact of rapid urbanization on women’s status, sociocultural and economic obstacles to ethnic minority women’s participation in rural development, living conditions of young migrants working in the urban informal sector. Phase III resulted in three novel courses on Gender and Urban Issues, Gender and Rural Development, and Gender and Ethnic Minorities.

Key Words:

• capacity development
• curriculum development
• gender analysis
• higher education
• North–South collaboration
• qualitative research
• Vietnam