Nguyen Thi Bich - manager of Save the Children's education programme in Vietnam

Nguyen Thi Bich joined Save the Children's Vietnam programme in May 2001, as manager of the education programme.

"Save the Children's education work in Vietnam is with ethnic minorities, mainly in the mountainous areas in the north," she says. "The main problems for ethnic minorities in education are access, completion of basic education and transition to secondary school.

"The government has put a lot of resources into access to basic education for ethnic minorities. But there are gaps with completion of primary school and the transition to secondary school."

There are 53 ethnic minority groups in Vietnam, totalling over 10 million people (around 14 per cent of the total population), scattered over mountain areas (covering two-thirds of the country's territory) spreading from the North to the South. Poverty levels among ethnic minority communities are significantly higher than among the majority Viet Kinh community.

"Language is a big issue. There are 53 ethnic minorities in Vietnam, with their own languages. In schools the language of instruction is Vietnamese. A lot of children from ethnic minorities say that it's only in grade 3 that they started to understand what the teacher was saying. They don't speak Vietnamese before they come to school. But they also want to learn Vietnamese, because it's the way for them to get on.

"There are very few ethnic minority children in university - so the teachers tend to be from the majority community. They are posted to mountainous areas from the lowlands [where the majority Viet Kinh tend to live].

"The custom and culture in many ethnic minority groups is for girls to stay at home. They go to school late on and drop out early. And many of them marry young. The rate of enrolment in lower secondary school is very low, particularly among girls.

"Save the Children's programme works with ethnic minorities at the pre-primary level, so that children learn both languages - their community language and Vietnamese. In primary education, we promote active learning. Also, upgrading school facilities. Water and sanitation is a big issue in these schools. We did some models of good water and sanitation in schools, which the government replicated. Transition into secondary school is a new area for us to work in.

"We recruit teachers from ethnic minorities so that children have bi-lingual education. We are starting a pilot programme on bi-lingual education that we are getting donors support with and working with education policy team at head office. There will be a lot to take out of that, not just regionally but for our global programme.

"In our advocacy, we work at the different levels of government - central, provincial and district. For example, Save the Children developed a preschool curriculum in one district and the government has now introduced across all the mountainous areas where ethnic minority communities live. To do this work, you have to bring people down from provincial and central government and show them your programme at the community level. You have to assign time to bring them to the field."