Dong Nai Women’s Union: a big family of provincial women

Dong Nai Women’s Union receives the 3rd rank Independent Medal

The emulation movement “Women learn actively, work creatively and build a happy family” was combined with the campaign “Studying and following President Ho Chi Minh’s moral example” in order to diversify the forms of DWU’s activities. In particular, there are more than 300,000 turns of women participating in these movements each year, and the number of participants is always larger than that of previous year. As a result, there were nearly 120,000 women being awarded the title of “excellent woman” in 5 consecutive years.

A member of the Union participates in economic development

The development of family economy is considered as one of the Union’s key tasks. Accordingly, the whole province now has nearly 13,000 poor households headed by women. The Union has so far joined hands with social policy bank in the province to provide loans for over 90% of poor households, helping 3,000 households overcome poverty under the new criteria. Moreover, more than 90,000 turns of women were provided low-interest loans or interest-free loans totalling over VND200 billion. The Union now has more than 4,000 savings groups of women with over 58,000 members and a thousand of other lending groups. The Union also helped 16,000 women find jobs in local companies. The Union joined hands with the provincial Agricultural Encourage Centre and Farmers’ Association to open 900 training courses on cultivation and animal husbandry for over 30,000 turns of women.

Chairwoman Dao Nguyen is granting certificates of merit to excellent members

Toghether with the task of family economy development, the Union also focuses on building prosperous, equal, progressive, and happy families. The Union held talk shows on child care and education, and the way organizing family life; opened cooking contests and flower arranging contests for poor women; and established Happy Family Club, etc. The Union also coordinated with health care centres and the centres for protection of mothers and children to provide free-of-charge health check-ups and treatment for 200,000 turns of poor women and children with a total cost of over VND1.1 billion. Other social activities of the Union included granting a thousand of scholarships worth nearly VND1.4 billion and presenting gifts to Vietnamese heroic mothers and families of war martyrs and wounded soldiers.

A typical poor woman overcomes her difficulty

Special attention was paid to the task of building a strong union. The Union has so far had 430,220 members, accounting for 66%, in which 120,000 members are religious followers and over 17,000 members are ethnic women. The number of strong grassroots units has increased for years (from 71 units in 2001 to 137 units in 2009).

Nguyen Thi Thanh Hoa, Vice-Chairwoman of Dong Nai Women’s Union, said that in order to gain these impressive achievements during the past time, the Union has made non-stop efforts to renovate populization and mobilization work to attract more new members; enhancing the effectiveness of activities at grassroots level; and building a group of dynamic, creative and enthusiastic employees. Ms Hoa added that the Union in the upcoming time would continue to diversify its forms of activities; enhancing the cooperation among members; building a strong union, especially improving the quality of grassroots units; implementing such key projects: promoting the role of women in the time of industrialization and modernization, providing vocational training for female laborers, and instructing mothers to take care of their children well.

Reported by N.Le, Translated by Minh Minh