Occupational Safety and Health

Safer coffee work takes root as local capacity grows in Viet Nam’s coffee communities

A partnership creates lasting impact when the knowledge and skills it builds are carried forward by those it has trained.

24 June 2026

Content also available in: tiếng Việt

GIA NGHIA, Viet Nam (ILO News) – In the coffee-growing highlands of Viet Nam, the ILO's Vision Zero Fund has spent several years working with farming communities to make work safer, including training farmers, building local knowledge, and gradually shifting how occupational safety and health (OSH) is understood and practised on the ground.

When a two-day OSH refresher training concluded in Gia Nghia on 22 May 2026, that work reached a new threshold: for the first time, the training session was delivered entirely by the partners’ local team, without an external specialist present. That shift matters as it is precisely what sustainable development is supposed to look like.

The training brought together 30 lead farmers under the Nescafé Plan programme, using the Work Improvement in Neighbourhood Development approach and Participatory Action-Oriented Training method (WIND/PAOT) that has anchored OSH work in these coffee communities for years. What the method does well is keep learning close to reality: seasonal rhythms, household pressures, small and practical improvements that farmers can actually act on.

Nguyen Trong Tuong, Project Manager of the Nescafé Plan in Viet Nam, guides the first in-house WIND/PAOT refresher as Nestlé’s training capacity continues to grow.

Nguyen Trong Tuong, Project Manager of the Nescafé Plan, led the sessions. Over a day and a half, he guided participants through discussions rooted in the realities of coffee-growing life, not just encouraging them to think about what they could change, but how they could bring those ideas back to the farmers and households around them. His ability to do so independently, without external support, is itself evidence that the partnership's investment in people has taken hold. But it also modelled exactly what the WIND/PAOT approach asks of every participant: that knowledge doesn't stop at the training room door.

"This refresher was not only about reviewing knowledge," Tuong said. "It was about helping lead farmers feel confident to discuss safety and health, and to encourage practical improvements with others."

The lead farmer model sits at the centre of this story. It works on a simple logic: that OSH knowledge travels furthest when it moves through trusted, local voices - people who share the same soil, the same seasons and the same daily constraints as the farmers they are speaking with. Training lead farmers is not just about reaching individuals; it is about creating a network of people who can continue the conversation long after a session ends. Nguyen Thi Trang, a lead farmer from Commune 10 in Gia Nghia, put it plainly. "When I return home, I can apply these improvements not only to my family, but also to share these ideas with other members in my group," she said. "It is easier to explain when the examples come from our own work." That is the multiplier effect the model depends on, and what makes the sustainability of local training capacity so consequential.

Hoang Thi Trang, a lead farmer under the Nescafé programme in Gia Nghia, applies the WIND checklist on coffee farms, following guidance provided during the training. She also engages with farm owners to better understand current practices.

On the farm, participants pay close attention and record the practices they observe using the checklist.

The scale of what the ILO’s Vision Zero Fund-Nestlé partnership has built gives that sustainability real weight. By the end of 2025, the project had reached 21,872 farmers with OSH training through 455 sessions, while 21,513 had been trained on labour law. As of May 2026, 628 farms had implemented 2,256 documented OSH improvements, a figure that reflects not just awareness raised, but behaviour changed and conditions improved at farm level.

The May training in Gia Nghia was not the beginning of that story. But it may represent a turning point in it: the moment when the knowledge and the confidence to pass it on no longer needed to come from outside.

In Gia Nghia, as participants left with practical plans and renewed confidence, the session carried a clear signal. The OSH model built through the WIND/PAOT approach is becoming self-sustaining, held not by any single institution, but by the trainers and lead farmers who are now its custodians. That is the kind of progress a partnership should aim for, and in Viet Nam's coffee communities, it is increasingly the reality.

Participants identify three good practices observed at the coffee farm and present them during group discussion. This is an important part of the training, as it turns field observations into practical lessons that can be shared more widely.

Nestlé agronomists also support lead farmers by highlighting the key points from the checklist, making it easier for them to remember and apply them in practice.

***The Vision Zero Fund (VZF) project in Viet Nam supports improvements in occupational safety and health (OSH) and related social conditions in coffee-farming communities, with a focus on farm-level working conditions. Project activities promote safer and healthier work practices among coffee farmers and raise their awareness of labour rights and social protection, with the aim to reduce the risk of occupational injuries and diseases, improve farm workers’ access to their labour rights and social protection benefits, and promote formalization.