Especially women who spend most of their time in the fields.
In terms of education, in the results, over 70% of women have secondary education, 16.7% of women have tertiary education and 3.3% has primary education.
Meanwhile, university degree is achieved by one women only. The low level of education and pressure on the number of dependents in the family will cause difficulties for women when they want to create sustainable livelihoods and coping strategies.
Secondly, in terms of asset, poor households have fewer means of living than middle-income households. All households have motorbikes. Of which, most poor households have a motorbike for more than 5 years. The average household has 1 to 4 motorcycles and many motorcycles are newly purchased. More than 50% of households do not use bicycles. In addition, most of households has 1 TV and 1 refrigerator. However, 1 household does not have television and 1 household has 2
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televisions. 5 households do not have refrigerators and 1 household has 3 refrigerators.
Especially, only one household has a truck and one household has a washing machine.
In general, poor households are vulnerable due to lack of facilities, especially in times of natural disasters. For example, they do not have good transportation facilities to evacuate, so old furniture is prone to damage when natural disasters occur…
When it comes to income, the main income of local people is mainly from agricultural production, including cultivation, livestock, forestry and aquaculture. In addition, some households earn income from small businesses, part-time jobs which more than 30% of households. In 2016, the lowest household income is 12,000,000 vnd / year and the highest is 194,000,000 vnd / year. On average, households have income about 3-4,000,000 / month. In these, 7 households received a small grant (1-2 million / year) from the government. It costs a lot of money such as children going to school, medical treatment, daily meals, electricity bills, wedding parties, funeral or some households repairs home, buy new furniture, sudden sickness so income of 70%
households are often not enough. When a disaster occurs, the work of the households will be unstable, leading to low income, especially those have no saving money.
Moreover, the cultivated land area is an important factor in the household's livelihoods and so much depends on the livelihood vulnerability of the households. As a household has much productive land, the income will be accumulated to use for adapting to disasters. Therefore, the vulnerability is reduced. According to survey data, all households have forest land and farm land, some households have land for perennial crops and aquaculture land. The largest cultivated land area is 10.74 hectares and the smallest is 1.08 hectares. On average, each household has about 4-5 hectares
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of total cultivated land. Cultivated land is mainly used for growing bananas, rice and vegetables and fish. However, from 2015, many households have shifted to acacia and manglietia glauca plantation, because the banana has many pests and diseases. Many households want to expand their farming but they do not have land anymore.
Furthermore, social organization plays a crucial role in adapting to climate change. There are 60% of the surveyed Tay women are members of the women union, 26.7% are women union and farmer group members, and 6.7% are women who do not participate in any group. In Thanh Van commune, interested groups are becoming very popular and helping women a lot. The proportion of Tay women who are involved in groups such as banana cultivation, saving group or joining both is 76.7%. This is an important factor in the dissemination, propaganda as well as mobilization of women to participate in the work of warning and prevention of harm caused by natural disasters in the locality. For example, through the meetings of the women union or the savings group, the ADC’s staff held training courses on planting and restoring of banana gardens for village saving and loan associate members which there are many women members, and local staffs to share experiences on banana varieties selection techniques, growing techniques and pest control. Since 2011, the ADC has interested in Thanh Hoa Commune, and especially there are projects targeting ethnic minorities responding to climate change such as “Ginger, medicinal plant model intercrop with bananas to adapt to drought on sloping land (2011-2014)”, “Ethinic minority adapt to climate change in Bac Kan province”, “Climate Justice Feminist Participatory Action Research” (2017) and many other projects. From 2014, the Department of Natural Resources and Environment in Bac Kan Province took part in the prevention of the
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impacts of climate change but women have been not received much attention. Every year, commune authorities develop plans for forest protection, scientific and technical methods in production to respond to climate change, but when applying these plans, commune authorities have not really paid much attention (comments of the Head of women union in Thanh Van).
Unfortunately, supports from local authorities are not enough to help households overcome difficulties in the context of natural disasters because of lacking of fund. A Tay women in Na Ray said that one household in Quan Lang village suffered a extreme drought and 0.13 hectares of rice fields lost. Local authorities supported 60,000vnd to buy new seeds and overcome the consequences but this amount of money only enough for electricity money to pump water into the field. One fact that researcher heard from a lady was that ADC’s staff directly guided how to make vermicompost to kill fungi in bananas, improve yield and provided vermicompost for her to carry out but she took this for orange trees. Of course, neither orange nor banana are not as effective as expected. These misconceptions are due to unequal perceptions of women.
Adaptive capacity through the above factors of women is low. The livelihood activities of women are vulnerable to natural disasters because the human factor is insufficient in both quantity and level, limited assets, low financial returns due to unstable incomes, limited cultivated land area and lack of irrigation water, although social factor is diverse, this is not sufficient to overcome the consequences of natural disasters.
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