Agri Climate resilience engaging TYM Vietnam#s labour force works in agricultural sector, 80% of its population lives in rural area; agriculture accounts for 22% of GDPand 30% of export turnover.
Farmers in the Central Highland region of Vietnam are highly vulnerable to the impacts of disaster and climate risks. People in these areas are facing with more extreme rainfall; along with less predictable and unseasonal storm surges,saltwater intrusion and unseasonal fluctuations in ambient temperatures. Livelihoods of residents such as cultivation, farming or fishing are being significantly affected, resulting to the decrease in people#s income and the threat of food insecurity. According to World Bank, Vietnam loses 1 # 1,5% of GDP (approximately US $257 million) annually because of disasters like floods, typhoons, landslides and droughts. The agricultural sector, which contributes about 22 percent of GDP, is most affected. An increase in the temperature, sea level rise, saltwater intrusion in freshwater or water scarcity can all lead to loss of arable land, lower yields and higher costs for both farmers and traders.
TYM is a micro-finance institution and their mission is to improve the living quality of low income women and their families, especially poor and disadvantaged women by providing financial and non # financial services, currently serving almost 150,000 poor and low-income women in 12 provinces . However they are facing some challenges: (i) lack of awareness and capacity to identify climate and disaster risks as well as and mitigation measures to make well-informed decisions on how best to respond to environmental challenges so that they can minimise losses; (ii) TYM members (borrowers who are mainly low-income women agricultural small-scale producers/farmers and agricultural micro, small and medium enterprises) are often the most affected by disasters and climate change impacts but they are coping with these situations in an ad-hoc manner as due to the lack of understanding over the impacts of disaster and climate risks to theirbusiness and farming activities; (iii) TYM and their members many micro, small and medium agricultural enterprises and small scale producers and farmers that borrow credit are lack of capacity in integrating disaster risk reduction (DRR) and climate change adaptation (CCA) measures into business strategies to ensure continuous and sustainable business activities; (iv) credit officers don#t have sufficient capacity and awareness to identify climate and disaster risks, as well as ability in making decisions that respond to environmental challenges to minimise losses; (v) lack of a resilience standard in the credit system to effectively build resilience to disasters and climate change risks for borrowers (low income women) and TYM; Moreover, there is no specialized product that fully supports for people to adapt to climate change.
The natural hazards and climate change have brought negative impact on the business continuity and resilience of TYM members (borrowers who are mainly low-income women agricultural small-scale producers/farmers and agricultural micro, small and medium enterprises) leading to economic losses for both members/ borrowers and TYM. TYM shows strong commitment to address above discussion challenges to strengthen the resilient capacity and practice of the borrowers and the MFI to better response to disaster and climate risks. However, they don#t have internal technical expertise on DRR and CCA as well as their current financial programmes for DRR and CCA are limited.  Additionally, Oxfam Novib at The Hague has agreed to provide TYM a loan of 1.5 million Euro under the Thematic Unit on Governance and Financial Flows, for that reason there is a strong need of implementing DRR/CCA interventions and support for TYM as a borrower.
This project is designed to build resilience to disaster and climate risks for borrowers who are agricultural small-scale producers/farmers, agri-MSMEs (especially low-income women, women entrepreneurship) in engagement with MFIs through increased capacity and improved credit system which is piloted in 03 provinces (Nam ##nh, Thanh Hóa, Ngh# An), the most affected area by disaster and climate risks while having outstanding agriculture - rural credit loan.
TYM has committed an initial actions to replicate ensure the outreach and sustainability of this engagement: (i) TYM committed to contribute funding for staff cost and management cost for implement the project;  (ii) at community level, TYM will carried out training on business continuity planning and DRR/CCA for their borrowers; (ii) at organization level, TYM will apply the credit assessment tools which include resilience standards in their program and strategy; (iii) TYM considers to develop a credit product/fund supporting borrowers (low income women) to better access to the fund for DRR/CCA if having proven evidence from piloted model.