United Kingdom
A copywriter, feature journalist & editor from Ireland. I spent 6 years living and writing in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Since 2019, I spend my time between Cape Town, South Africa and Belfast, Northern Ireland.
Today, 56% percent of the world's population lives in urban areas-a 10% growth since the turn of the 21st century. The United Nations forecasts that by 2050, that number will have grown to 68%, with 90% of this increase happening across Asia and Africa.
As part of Vietcetera's ongoing series of discussions with women in business leadership roles, we spoke with HEINEKEN's Le Thi Thu Hien, Vo Ho Bich Tram, and Holly Bostock about coping with, and leading through, the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. It goes, almost without saying, that the pandemic has changed just about everything.
In early March, Vietcetera wrote about how eco-friendly startups could be the next major trend for venture capital in Vietnam. The fact that four Vietnamese Greentech startups (Wiibike, IoTeamVN, Hachi, and PLASTIC People Company) showcased their eco-solutions at the AsiaBerlin Summit in late 2021 offers encouragement that this trend is beginning to take shape.
It's been a whirlwind two years building Ubisoft's first studio in Vietnam. The company cut the ribbon on its Da Nang Studio in June 2020, just as the true gravity of the COVID-19 pandemic was emerging in Vietnam. The mission back then, as detailed by Managing Director Aurelien Palasse when we last chatted with him, was to tap into the impressive IT talent that Vietnam has to offer - in a city that aims to become an innovation hub for startups and major international companies alike.
When venture capital investment in Vietnam reached a record-breaking US$900 million back in 2019, it seemed well within reason that 2020 would be the year the billion-dollar glass ceiling shattered. Alas, the impact of Covid-19 brought about a slowdown in 2020, with capital investment dropping to US$600 million.
It's just about impossible to claim that any one country has had a "good" 2020-21. There's barely a place on earth that hasn't paid some price for the Coronavirus pandemic. That said, Taiwan has had a better time than most - by no accident either.
When chocolate bars bearing the name Marou, Faiseurs de Chocolat began popping up in shops and cafes around Saigon a decade ago - each artful wrapper proudly proclaiming the Vietnamese province its cacao had come from - you would have been forgiven for thinking the brand had been around for a long while, such was its sense of place.
On stage at the Mic Drop Comedy Club in Limerick, Nghia Mai tells the story of sitting in a Scottish pub, watching Japan defeat a heavily favored South Africa at the 2015 Rugby World Cup.
According to USAID, Vietnam produces at least 2.5 million tons of plastic waste every year, putting it amongst the world's top five plastic polluters. The country's accelerated economic growth over the last three decades has been driven largely by the traditional "take, make, dispose" linear economy, which results in huge amounts of unusable, non-recyclable waste ending up in landfill, or indeed in the ocean.
Sean Campbell, originally from Co Tyrone, lives in Cape Town . South Africa has been battling a more contagious variant of coronavirus that has now been detected in Europe, Asia and the Americas, including Ireland.