In line with CARE Vietnam’s program priorities, Financial Linkage for Inclusion – a project funded by VISA - focuses on empowering ethnic minority women in Dien Bien through financial inclusion. The programme was implemented from July 2015 until March 2018. This project aims to increase Remote Ethnic Minority Women’s access to formal financial products and services to increase their financial inclusion. Under FinLINK, CARE International in Vietnam entered into a partnership with LienVietPost Bank to deploy the solution. It focuses on piloting a product is ViViet to support ethnic minority women VLSA members with access to formal financial services including savings and micro-loans.

The greatest impact of the project is to help the women know how to save money and manage their families’ finance. This would have huge downscale impacts in terms of families being able to improve their family health, education status etc. 97.6% of the VSLA group members said that they could save money on a regular basis. Among the increased income sources, 85.5% of the women (the highest proportion) said that their families’ income increased thanks to their shares contributed to the VSLA groups and their interests. Because of a habit of saving, 65.9% of the women said that they always managed to keep cash for urgent and emergent situations like sickness, paying children’s tuition fees, buying
fertilizer/pesticide in the event of a pest attack. The project clearly impacted not just at the level of building knowledge but there is an evidence of actual change in the behavior.