Project managers

The Da Nang Street Children Programme (DSCP) helps around 360 displaced and street children. It provides them with clothing, housing, education, health care and employment skills. Its managers are charismatic and committed, but desperately over worked. Staff members are enthusiastic and experienced, but there’s little opportunity for staff development and wages are very low.

DSCP is keen to increase its financial independence in order to expand its activities, and to provide more funding for core costs, such as staff development. DSCP needs guidance in planning how to undertake such activities and help in producing a strategic plan which would allow it to approach different donors. As a volunteer with DSCP you’ll share your management skills and assess, advise and facilitate both your colleagues’ and the organisation’s development.

What does the role involve?

• Training colleagues in project management
• Supporting colleagues in proposal writing
• Implementing monitoring and evaluation processes
• Supporting the development of a strategic plan
• Arranging the provision of trainers

Skills, qualifications and experience required

You’ll have a degree and ideally a further qualification in organisational development or management, as well as a minimum of five years’ experience in developing people, projects and performance systems. You’ll need excellent communication and inter-personal skills and you’ll be sensitive to the local culture and ways of working. You’ll be working in fairly basic conditions so you’ll need an innovative and creative approach. Patience, flexibility and a good sense of humour are important traits in all VSO volunteers.

And the rest...

Vietnam is a long, thin country in South East Asia, bordering Cambodia, Thailand and Laos. The country has a beautiful coastline that stretches over 3,000 km along the South China Sea while the interior has brilliant green rice paddies and impressive mountains, some covered in dense, misty forest. You’ll be based in Da Nang, a major port city on the south coast of the country. Vietnamese cuisine is quite similar to Thai food - curries, soups and noodle dishes, with soy sauce, lemongrass and often lots of chillies!