UNICEF Viet Nam: UPSHIFT:Viet Nam -The Journey Continues

Continuing from our previous update, 10 teams with a total of 31 participants were identified through a judging process from a pool of 93 applications. Out of the 31 participants, 49% of which were youths with disabilities: 10 visually impaired, 4 deaf, and 1 disabled people; 19% came from disadvantaged backgrounds and living in different social protection centers in Ho Chi Minh City; 29% were students majoring in social works, and we even had a high school student as a team leader!

These 10 teams continued on with their UPSHIFT journey through 3-day intensive bootcamp at the end of November 2015. In this phase, teams were exposed to the skill-sets they need to design, build, and test their products as well as how to execute and manage their projects. If this sounds like a lot of things to learn over 3 days, you are right. Going into the bootcamp our team was worried that the participants wouldn’t be able to keep up, or that the lessons wouldn’t be adapted into the projects. Through the extensive preparation and the outstanding commitment of the participants, mentors, and speakers our fears were unfounded.

Mentors, supporter and UPSHIFT Organizer

UPSHIFT Workshop © UNICEF/Innovations Lab Ho Chi Minh/

UPSHIFT Workshop/ Truong Viet Hung/November 2015

Creating a support network for participants

Many of our participants in UPSHIFT are encountering the methods of design thinking, lean startup, and basic finance for the very first time. For this reason, it is vital to the program to create a strong and stable supporting network around them. This creates consistent opportunities that are a freely available to them whenever they need support. In the creation of this support network in Viet Nam, we needed to identify ways for the teams to get support beyond the days of the workshop. This support not only had to be technical in nature (i.e. knowledge transfer), but also provide empowerment, encouragement, constructive criticism, and be able to build trust.

We built a support network with a multi-stakeholder approach: with local experts and volunteers from the for-profit and non-profit sector including startups, entrepreneurs, industry and civil society leaders.

Each team was assigned one mentor and supporter, and were required to attend the entire bootcamp. In addition, we had a speaker for each section of the curriculum. Some supporters had relevant skills for the team projects, and others had experiential knowledge to share.

Besides the mentors and speakers, Viet Youth Entrepreneurs built a supporting volunteer team. Each supporter was available to help a specific team throughout their learning and executing process. The volunteer squad also ensured that all elements of the workshop were accessible to all participants. This was critical as we didn’t expect to have such a strong presence of participants with physical disabilities.

Orientation & Stakeholder Mapping

The teams were assigned ‘homework’ to encourage real life user testing and validation.

Participants at the Orientation Day before core workshop

UPSHIFT Workshop © UNICEF/Innovations Lab Ho Chi Minh/

UPSHIFT Workshop/ Nguyen Le Nam/November 2015

From left to right: Nguyen Minh Tuan, La Thi Mai Thu, Nguyen Minh Hai, Dao Van Thom (participants) and Bui Nguyen Nhat Minh (supporter)

UPSHIFT Workshop © UNICEF/Innovations Lab Ho Chi Minh/

UPSHIFT Workshop/ Nguyen Le Nam/November 2015

After meeting with their mentors and supporters, the teams started their first lesson: creating a stakeholder map. This stakeholder map is used extensively in the early sections of the UPSHIFT curriculum to keep track of the people benefiting from the projects.

Vong Quang Ky, member of the visually impaired team, was touching the physical model to imagine the stakeholder mapping

UPSHIFT Workshop © UNICEF/Innovations Lab Ho Chi Minh/

UPSHIFT Workshop/ Tran Thi Hoai Thu/November 2015

After the first orientation lesson, our supporters saw that the teams were able to identify core stakeholders very well, but secondary and other influencers were harder to nail down. Each team had wonderful ideas, the desire to change and to bring meaning and impactful projects to the community. However, they were lacking the experience and skills to gain the broader perspective they need to make their projects real. To help the teams expand their understanding of the different actors and their perspective of the problem, they completed at least 5 stakeholder interviews between orientation and the workshop. .

Workshop: 72 hours to make it real

Training Sessions

UPSHIFT Workshop Program © UNICEF/Innovations Lab Ho Chi Minh/

UPSHIFT Workshop/November 2015

Understanding the Problem

A quote attributed to Albert Einstein goes — 'If I had an hour to solve a problem I'd spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about solutions.'

While we didn’t quite spend the majority of our time thinking about the problem, the first step of UPSHIFT is to go back to that original problem statement and dig deeper and iteratively refine it using real stakeholder information and further insights. Teams refined their problem in a logical way, such as: a problem tree, stakeholder mapping, and personas for each target group. Each team was able to identify a clear problem statement, whom it was impacting, who the beneficiaries were and how they might behave, and what impact the team was hoping to create.