Lobby workshop Vietnam Women Entrepreneurs Council

DECP special advisor Thieu Korten and Nguyen Hoang Yen, a female Vietnamese trainer, jointly presented a two-day workshop on lobby in Ninh Binh, a province in the North of Vietnam.  The workshop was attended by 22, mainly female, participants  many of them operating small businesses.

It was definitely not the first lobby-workshop in Vietnam facilitated by DECP, but time and again there proved to be quite a distance between lobbying in Western multiparty democracies than in a country governed by a people’s party of which there obviously can only be one. Nonetheless there is a clear demand from the business community to bring in trainers experienced in western lobbying techniques. To bridge the gap it was decided to organise a lobby-workshop moderated by a Vietnamese trainer with a DECP expert as a co-trainer, primarely to bring in ‘foreign’ examples.  

Participants were familiarized with the different stages of a lobby process  and practiced  the setting up of a lobby strategy for a chosen subject of interest to their business community.

The set-up proved worthwhile, but a second round in a more industrialised province will lead to more robust conclusions with regard to this ‘two-culture’ approach.