TOPIC64 Success stories: Vietnamese Young People Prepare for Vietnam's Admission to WTO

Ngo Thi Minh Phuong, 30, Public Tea Bureau Employee

Ngo Thi Minh Phuong lives in Vietnam’s Thai Nguyen province, an area two hours north of Hanoi whose rolling hillsides support a thriving tea industry – and tens of thousands of small farmers.

Until this year, Phuong hand-wrote and photocopied all the documents she sent to the local farmers. It usually took hours for her to get a note finished, and days to get it to farmers. So Phuong took it upon herself to learn computer and Internet skills when the new TOPIC64 learning center offered IT classes in her town. She paid the US$15 tuition for the basic course out of her own pocket.

She continually uses the center’s 3G CDMA high-speed wireless Internet connection to dig up information to share with local farmers, and by using Excel and Power Point, she gets it out to the farmers much quicker. Best of all, she can tell farmers the price that wholesalers in Hanoi are paying – in real time.

Nguyen Duc Ngoc, 15, Student

After a summer of studying IT at a local TOPIC64 learning center near his home, 15-year-old Nguyen Duc Ngoc knows exactly what he wants to do with his life. He wants to share the things he is learning about IT with others.

Ngoc used his two-month summer vacation this year to study the basic IT curriculum at the TOPIC64 learning center in Thai Nguyen. Most of his classmates were older -- he was one of three teenagers who spent their summer vacation studying Excel spreadsheets, Power Point presentations and Internet skills.

Tran Manh Thieu, 27, Entrepreneur

Vietnam is full of ambitious entrepreneurs like 27-year-old Tran Manh Thieu. Thieu, a quiet, savvy man with wispy sideburns, has been making decorative clay pots and vases in his home village near Hanoi since 2003. Thieu knows his growing company needs to distinguish itself – and this year the TOPIC64 learning center in nearby Que Vo town gave him a way to do it.

Until this year, he was the only person in his company who could use a computer. So when he learned that the nearby TOPIC64 center, about 15 minutes away, would begin offering a course in Web design, he jumped.

Thieu signed four of his employees up for classes that began in October. They’ll learn skills in Excel to keep the finances straight, and Web design so they can develop a webpage that will let the company advertise its wares overseas and build an online sales capacity. “We are hoping to develop export markets,” Thieu explains. “The U.S. is a long-term strategic market.”

As Vietnam develops its own companies and industries, IT is crucial for those enterprises to build themselves. Smart businessmen like Thieu see the learning opportunities that a program like TOPIC64 offers.