Success Stories

With grit and gratitude, a disabled young seamstress created a new life for herself and others like her.

As a young, disabled woman living in Vietnam, Tran Hoang Yen lived in bleak circumstances. She had no savings and rarely left her home in Ho Chi Minh City. In a society where few opportunities were available for the poor, the disabled or women, it was difficult for her to imagine any other life.

Then, Yen took part in a U.S.-funded special leadership program for disabled people with limited financial resources. Suddenly, her vision of the future was transformed.

Although the Vietnamese economy supports independent small businesses, only the able-bodied usually have access to necessary resources. The program helped Yen gain the skills, knowledge and confidence she needed to start her own small business and provided a small grant to help get it off the ground.

Today, Yen is a successful, self-employed business owner who provides jobs for 17 disadvantaged young people — more than half are women with disabilities — at her small sewing shop. Her products are distributed in markets and department stores in Ho Chi Minh City, Hanoi, Hai Phong, Danang and provinces in the Mekong delta. Her annual sales exceed 1 billion dong (around $70,000) — an especially amazing accomplishment for a young woman who used to earn an average of $30 a month.

Hope, determination and the resources offered by the leadership program enabled Tran Hoang Yen to overcome daunting odds and become a productive participant in her country’s economy. And she didn’t stop there. She pushed open the door for other disabled young people to move into the future with courage, dignity and confidence.

You, too, can open a door to a better One Shared World.