To attract tourists, Ha Thi
Yen, a young Thai ethnic resident in Lac village of Chieng Chau commune (Mai
Chau district), has made many traditional-style brocade products.
There are more than 10,380 young people in Mai Chau at present, including over 4,000 members of the Ho Chi Minh Communist Youth Union (HCYU), but 60-70 percent of young people work at faraway companies and factories.
To encourage young people to start careers right in their hometown, the district’s HCYU Committee has been promoting a movement in which secretaries of grassroots HCYU committees have taken the lead in economic development, and many of them have gained success from agricultural and community-based tourism startups.
For example, Secretary of the Thanh Son communal HCYU Committee Ha Thi Tam and Secretary of the HCYU unit in the commune’s Noong Luong hamlet Ha Van Toan have earned profit from cultivating off-season vegetables. Meanwhile Ha Cong Thinh, Secretary of the HCYU unit in Lac village of Chieng Chau commune, is a role model in community-based tourism development.
Chieng Chau is one of the communes with an effective startup movement among the youth in Mai Chau district.
Ha Thi Yen, born in the 1990s, from Lac village of Chieng Chau commune, is a typical example. Wishing to preserve the cultural identity of the Thai ethnic group, she has devoted herself to developing community-based tourism since 2017, and her target is tourists with demand for high-quality services.
Yen said community-based tourism is mushrooming everywhere, so in order to gain a foothold, she strived to create a homestay space that is in harmony with the nature and, especially, imbued with cultural identities of her ethnic group. Besides, she also designs brocade clothes, bags, and pillows as souvenirs which have won over visitors’ preference.
In 2019, her family earned more than 1 billion VND (nearly 43,400 USD at the current exchange rate) from homestay services. Last year, despite the COVID-19 outbreak’s impact on tourism, the number of visitors to her homestay facility was still stable, Yen noted.
Ha Van Linh, Secretary of the HCYU Committee of Mai Chau district, said to assist young people in starting a career, the committee has worked with the community learning centres of localities to open vocational training courses.
In 2020, it coordinated with the district’s vocational training and continuing education centre to organise eight training courses for 254 people, equipping them with such agricultural techniques as vegetable, water melon, cattle, and chicken farming skills. They worked together to provide jobs for 960 rural residents, more than 60 percent of whom were young people.
The committee has also done a good job of managing loans entrusted by the Vietnam Bank for Social Policies. The entrusted outstanding loans under its management has surpassed 66 billion VND, Linh added./.
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