Helping hand for migrant workers

Two graduates from Plan's Livelihood Advancement Business School (LABS) in Vietnam have hailed it as a life-changing experience.

Dinh Thi Loan, an IT graduate in 2005, had been struggling for years to make a living in Hanoi after moving to the city from a rural province after high school. She often worked 20 hours a day, seven days a week as a stone buffer, which left her hands bloody and sore but put just £15 in her pocket each month.

"Back then I was like an animal, not thinking, just doing, and running on pure adrenalin from one thing to the next," she recalled." I had no hope for the future. I felt I was stuck in a trap and that the older I got, the fewer opportunities I would have."

Loan's fortunes changed however when she saw an advertisement for LABS, which had originally been set up in India in by the Dr Reddy Foundation and introduced to Vietnam by Plan in 2004.

Crucially, the course was free and at the application event Loan became even more inspired by the sight of an object millions across the globe regard as a mundane item - a swivel office chair. Loan had never even seen one before. She recalled: "I vowed there and then I would someday get a job that would let me sit in a chair like that."

Loan enrolled on an IT course that focused on office administration and was soon offered a position with the Vietnamese company, Viet Fast. She has been promoted twice and now works as a sales coordinator for distribution and investment company Phu Thai, earning almost seven times her salary as a stone buffer.

She said: "Words cannot express what LABS means to me. It has given me wings of hope and the foundations to make a decent life for myself."

Mother-of-two To Thi Le Ninh, who graduated from a hospitality course in Hue in 2006, is now a housekeeper at the four-star Green Hotel thanks to LABS. Ninh's schooling had ended when she was 15, when she went to DaNang to work as a tailor before returning to Hue to become a helper at the car factory where her father worked.

Ninh, who married at 18, was forced out of the family home when her father died and her stepmother took possession of the house and other assets, but her fortunes improved when she took the LABS course and quickly found employment afterwards.

So far, LABS has helped almost 3,000 people aged between 17 and 25 to find jobs in Vietnam, with the majority trained in hospitality, customer relations and sales and information technology services.