For more than 20 years, RENEW in Vietnam has been working to make Vietnam safe from the American-Vietnam War’s deadly legacies. With support from individuals and major international donors, we now deploy 17 clearance and survey teams and two rapid response teams and deliver effective programs for risk education and support for disabled victims of war legacy explosives and Agent Orange.
Since 2008 RENEW has found, removed, and destroyed over 105,000 cluster bombs and other war explosives in Quang Tri Province. In 2020 that total was 8,546, and our rapid response teams responded to 645 emergency calls from local people in our villages. We are at a similar pace in 2021.
RENEW collaborates with local government, community organizations, and teachers’ unions to deliver risk education programs to school children and adults. We have given artificial limbs and assistive devices to more than 2,000 war amputees in the province hospital and by our mobile team in the remotest villages. We also provide micro-credit loans and other income support to families affected by explosions and run six vocational facilities for blind war victims.
RENEW is the only comprehensive mine action organization in Vietnam that integrates explosives survey and clearance, mine risk education and mine victim assistance into a coordinated program of action. So far, that model exists only in Quang Tri Province.
As funding and resources become available, RENEW is responding to requests from other provinces to help them create the same model with the goal that all aspects of war legacies can be addressed by a locally managed Vietnamese organization in partnership with international NGOs.
Project RENEW is a partnership established in 2001 between the Quang Tri Province government and international NGOs to address the legacies of the Vietnam war. It carries out all RENEW’s operations in Vietnam and has broad support from the province government, local organizations and the communities in which we work. Project RENEW has an all-Vietnamese staff and is headquartered in Dong Ha City, Quang Tri Province. Since 2008, its principal international partner has been Norwegian People’s Aid, a global leading humanitarian disarmament and mine action organization, which supports RENEW’s explosives clearance program and administrative staffing. Major funding for technical demining components of RENEW comes from the U.S. Department of State. The Project RENEW website provides a full description of its program and staff.
Friends of Project RENEW is an active, all-volunteer U.S. organization that works closely with Project RENEW to advance its work in Vietnam, including inspiring support and increasing public awareness of RENEW’s goals and activities. We are a registered 501(c)(3) charitable organization, and donations are tax deductible to the extent provided by U.S. law. Friends of Project RENEW financial information is here and its Board of Directors may be found here.
