Listening to Young Lives at Work in Vietnam: First Call

This brief report provides a first look into the data collected during the first of three calls in Young Lives at Work's Phone Survey in Vietnam and highlights some of the key emerging findings. 

Vietnam was expected to be severely impacted by COVID-19 given the country’s close proximity to Wuhan, the initial centre of the pandemic. Thus far, however, the country has proved extremely adept at containing the health crisis, with lessons clearly learned from the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) outbreak in 2003.  Government measures have effectively succeeded in reducing the initial number of COVID-19 cases to zero. Although a second wave of infections has recently emerged (mostly related to the city of Da Nang), early signs suggest this outbreak is also being successfully brought under control.

In this first call, we found that most respondents have some knowledge of the symptoms of COVID-19 and the majority followed the recommended behaviours to prevent infection. While the response to the health crisis has been highly effective, income and employment losses have been severe. Government support is widespread and appears well targeted. However, the amount of support may be very small in some cases. Access to remote education has been generally high, although younger children, those in rural areas and those with less educated parents are less likely to learn in this way. 

The Young Lives phone survey aims to investigate the short and medium term impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the health, well-being, transition to the labour market and education trajectories of young people in our study, tracked since 2001 and now aged 19 and 26  The second phone survey call has been piloted and the fieldwork will take place during August-October 2020 in all four Young Lives study countries (Ethiopia, India, Peru and Vietnam).

Additional statistical and summary tables from the first phone survey can be found here.