RAID Network Australian and Vietnamese Partnership

Written by Megan Williams

Over the past five years, the RAID Australian and Vietnamese Partnership, together with the Crawford Fund and Australian Volunteers Program, has been on an incredible journey – a program with a future as bright as the many individuals that have contributed to it.

The RAID Australian and Vietnamese Partnership, started as a pilot program developed by Dr. Jenny Hanks, Dr. David McGill, and Dr. Mia Dunphy during COVID-19 in 2020. While time was not of the essence and there was a cry for connection, partnerships, and collaboration, an incredible initiative was forged between organisations in Australia and Vietnam. What started as a one-off program connecting early-stage researchers from Vietnam and Australia has quickly become a gateway of opportunities and connection, with the prospect of expanding further into South-East Asia.

Phase 1 of the program was developed in 2020 as an online scientific skills workshop to strengthen essential skills for international researchers working on local and international projects. The objective was to connect early-to-mid-career researchers (EMCRs) and post-graduates from Australia with those with the same skillsets in Vietnam, at the Vietnam National University of Agriculture (VNUA). Working with this connection, the Australian Volunteers Program developed a group remote volunteering assignment during a time when volunteering in-country was extremely difficult.

The assignment involved an online training program which saw six Australian and six Vietnamese participants, each as a partnered pair, meeting for over an hour, three to five times a week as they covered topics including digital data for research, research leadership and management, and scientific communication.

An online workshop focused on the important skill of science communication – not only the ability to articulately convey results to associated scientists, but also the capacity to conduct dialogue with the research end-user, the farmer. Participatory agricultural research is a collaborative process whereby researchers integrate the values, experience, and knowledge of growers into their research methodology, objectives and output, and this was imperative for all participants.

Fast-forward to 2023, and a “pilot” Phase 2 program began. The cohort of 2020 was able to be part of one of the Australian Volunteers Program’s earliest hybrid volunteering assignments (incorporating both remote and in-country volunteering), travelling to Vietnam to meet with the students and academics we had spent such a great depth of time connecting with online as early-stage researchers.

Meeting our counterparts in Vietnam, whom we had built such beautiful and deep relationships with over three years, was a very special occasion. When our volunteers stepped onto Vietnamese soil in mid-2023, they weren’t starting from scratch; armed with insights from Phase 1, Australian and VNUA researchers collectively brought a wealth of knowledge to their collaboration with local farmers and the agriculture industry.

The magic didn’t just happen on the ground. Before boots hit the soil, our team engaged in an intensive remote preparation phase: seven dynamic virtual sessions where volunteers weren’t just meeting – they were creating, with each participant collaborating with VNUA academics, crafting their own in-country activity, carefully aligned with VNUA’s priorities. These weekly digital gatherings became vibrant spaces for idea exchange and proposal refinement. To enrich the experience, RAID hosted three specialised webinars featuring expert insights on strategic activity design, effective co-design principles, and essential in-country volunteering practices.

Our RAIDers hit the ground running during a transformative two-week visit to Hanoi and North-West Vietnam, turning months of virtual planning into tangible action. The halls of VNUA buzzed with energy as volunteers worked shoulder-to-shoulder with Vietnamese researchers, fine-tuning their carefully crafted activities.

The excitement and opportunities generated in Phase 2, led to formulate a Phase 3 ‘scoping’ program with a focus on ensuring future program work would meet university, industry, and farmers’ objectives in Vietnam. Our four RAID Vietnam Researcher Program coordinators – Dr. Chi Mai Do, Dr. Anh Pham, Jessica Fearnley, and Megan Williams – spent time in North-West Vietnam in Son La, Hanoi and Hue to scope out and ensure this program could be the best it possibly could be. This meant meeting with organisations and universities to define exactly what is critical for EMCRs. Excitingly, what we found was an incredible synergy between Vietnam and Australia: research paper writing and publications!

From this, a 2025 program was developed, Phase 4, which focused on “How to write a research paper” and enhancing researcher skills in this space. Phase 4 saw with eight Australian volunteers working on a remote online training program with over 20 students and academics in Vietnam. The online program brought in experts who have worked around the world in research, delivering topics that they specialise in, surrounding the tips and tricks, as well as ‘do’s and do not’s’ of writing a paper. This was followed by volunteering alongside the faculties of Agronomy, Rural Development, Land and Resource Management, and Animal Science and Veterinary Medicine in-country at Hue University of Agriculture and Forestry (HUAF) in Hue, Central Vietnam. Each faculty designed programs tailored to the skills and expertise of all volunteers to enable collaboration and partnerships to build strong relationships for future projects, research, and opportunities.

What’s next for the RAID Australian and Vietnamese Partnership? Exciting opportunities await! Members of the 2025 cohort and future participants have an incredible interest to expand further into South-East Asia!

From the beginning of the RAID Australian and Vietnamese Partnership in 2020 to now, it has always been imperative for agricultural research to make a positive impact on the livelihoods of farmers and be driven by the farmers’ needs. The need to strengthen the capacity of agricultural researchers to work collaboratively with farmers at all stages of the research process, has always been the underlying principle of this incredible program – one that I was first lucky to participate in and am now honoured to be coordinating alongside a wonderful team!

The Australian Volunteers Program is an Australian Government-funded initiative.