Viet Nam Red Cross society (VNRC) is implementing a cash preparedness project since the past year which paves the way to acceptance of cash as one of their aid delivery modalities from emergency response to recovery and long-term development. Significant key achievements have been noted as manifested in the successful completion of several cash in emergency DREF responses and finalization of the VNRC’s CVA position paper among others. Results of external evaluations and the midterm review conducted last November 2018 revealed the little use VNRC makes of new technologies in general, digital means for data collection and management, such as tablets and mobile phones. As a result, considerable amount of time is spent on beneficiary data entry and sanitising the excel document to comply with data quality requirements. These bottlenecks affect the desired speed and over-all effectiveness of the assistance. VNRC will soon start delivering cash assistance though financial service provider to process fund transfers which further compounds the need for timely collection and management of data meeting the required quality standards.

To move forward, a 5-day workshop were organized in Ha Noi from 5^th to 8^th March 2019 with participation 32 people (12 female) from VNRC, IFRC, Swiss Red Cross, American Red Cross, government disaster management agency, Save the Children, and Catholic Relief Services. The training was facilitated by the IFRC and Swiss Red Cross.

The purpose of the training to build the capacity of VNRC staff by understanding and practically apply mobile data collection and management tools which will be rapidly deployed in response to emergencies. This training also attempted to link mobile data collection systems to beneficiary registration and monitoring in VNRC.

Evaluation from participants:

Overall it seems that participants were satisfied with the workshop as an introduction to digital data collection and management. Data literacy has strong links to other areas of work such as monitoring and reporting which were also of interest for participants but the time available was insufficient.

Next steps:

It is important that VNRC staff could practice the use of the digital tools in the scenario which is planned to take place in May so that data is collected with RR
Collect, managed with the RR platform and then linked to the FSP for cash distribution. Then VNRC can complete the learning cycle and put into practice what has been taught in the training.