Trần Anh Duy

Meet Tran Anh Duy from a rural ethnic Khmer community in Vietnam’s Mekong Delta, one of the areas predicted to be most adversely affected by global climate change and currently under threat from dams upstream of the Mekong River. As belonging to a community threatened by climate change, he devoted himself to the betterment of the environment. He has just graduated from Can Tho University, Vietnam, with a major in the Bachelor of Education. Through his remarkable motivation, he has excelled in his study, which brought him the knowledge and skills he gave directly back to his community in the form of a wide range of participatory environmental awareness activities.

Tran Anh Duy is one of the members of the Mekong Youth Farm Network (Y-Farm). This network gathers youth in Mekong Region countries to learn, share, improve, and change their knowledge and skills in sustainable farming activities. This network also tries to raise youth’s voice in the Mekong Region to the international arena on how climate change and development affect our local young farmers’ organic farming activities. He also focuses on raising awareness of children on sustainable farming activities in Can Tho City. It can help others to continue their studies in the future. With his bright and outgoing personality, he possesses a strong capacity to motivate his peers to defend community rights and the environment.

Tran Anh Duy would love to continue his works in Y-Farm as an assistant to make this network stronger. His goal is to pursue better knowledge and skills after participating in courses, workshops, English, and training to better work with Mekong delta communities to protect the environment on which they rely for their livelihoods. Through those activities, he aims to improve his decision-making and negotiation skills and his analysis of development-related issues. Participation in the program will enable him to explore the link between local problems in the Mekong Delta and global challenges by analyzing different growth and development models and their impacts on social inequalities, exclusion, and poverty. He used the grant to improve his English knowledge, continue his work for Y-farm, and reach out to Thailand to learn and find collaboration in the Y-network.