Green Capacity Building 4 Vocational Training Colleges in Vietnam

If a “greening” process is strived for, a project like approach can be used. Greeneducation4all is happy to share some experiences. The following article gives insides of a first baseline mission for Greening TVET in Vietnam. It is not covering a full project circle.

Greening Vocational Training in the South of Vietnam (GIZ & Greeneducation4all)

In the beginning of a project it is recommended to undertake a baseline study. With this a starting point is given und created impact can be measured later on. Two things have to be in place: there has to be time to undertake the questionnaire and somebody has to invest money to do it.

Don’t worry! A simple baseline can be done also for free using volunteers and simple questions like “What activities in sustainable use of energy are you already doing?”, “How many students are involved in the Green Club?”, “How often do you go out in the community and collect rubbish?”….and so on. After two years and a lot of work for the protection of environment, the same questions can be asked and if you have had impact the answers will show a difference in a positive way.

The following graph shows the result of such a question and answer session in five different Vocational training Colleges in the south of Vietnam. The development of the questionnaire and the interpretation of the answers had been undertaken by the Otto-von-Guericke University in Magdeburg. It shows where the institutes are standing in March 2014:

Starting from point zero, the colleges that want to start a greening process can undertake activities in different thematic fields. The simplest ones are awareness raising activities in the community or on the campus. Also planting trees and collecting rubbish are good in the beginning.

More difficult activities need the involvement of the college management and the sympathy of the principal. Examples are integrating environmental education in lesson plans and sustainability in workshop management. For the most advanced colleges, the task of greening would also involve green research, like building little solar systems and change usual working processes towards more sustainable ones.

The figure shows the distribution of future activities in the above mentioned, visited colleges in Vietnam sorted according to the 5 main thematic areas of greening in vocational training: Green Campus, Green Culture, Green Community, Green Curricula, Green Research.

 

CHALLENGES

In the Vietnamese context there are some important preconditions that have to be fulfilled before a successful process of “greening” the colleges can take place.

During a workshop with decision makers of vocational training colleges the main preconditions and supportive needs were documented:

– Clear responsibilities for the greening process in the lead agencies and in the colleges

– The involved agencies, departments and ministries have to agree on the need for greening vocational training and support the action of the colleges

– There have to be quality standards related to greening campus, workshop and curricula that is checked on from the responsible governmental agency

– The colleges need to know how to integrate greening in their processes. A set of guidelines need to be available on “How to do Greening TVET”

– There has to be teacher training for the integration of greening TVET

– Financial support needs to be available for the colleges

 

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