From Tanzania to Vietnam: spreading the word about a fair education system for all.

I’m Benson Langay from Tanzania: I work in marketing and sales while part-time volunteering with UVIKIUTA Tanzania from time to time. I am also a Digital Marketing student. 

I applied to Better Life Vietnam (BLV) because I love to take part in volunteering activities and I believe in sharing knowledge - there’s so much we could achieve both from the individual level and the organizational level, as well as getting to know new people from different parts of the world through exchanging different views towards achieving the common goals of the charity.

Because I am studying Digital Marketing, the project was a way of practising my skills and getting more experience from the other group members, as well as sharing what I know to support BLV’s mission of making life better for children in need in Vietnam.

My role during the period of volunteering with BLV was to promote BLV on social media (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube) while inviting my friends to “like” and support BLV from their social media accounts. Sometimes I share BLV’s posts on Facebook groups to increase our visibility in Canada and the USA. Many of my friends in the Caribbean were invited to “like” BLV, thereby increasing its reach. I educated my friends about BLV’s mission over social media, as well as sharing some new ideas and strategies to promote BLV across the globe.

What I wanted to see was people from all over the world supporting the charity work of BLV through donations - their aid would help the development of BLV’s humanitarian objectives supporting children’s education in Vietnam. Furthermore, I increased the number of interactions such as visiting different social media pages to “like”, “comment”, “invite”, “share” and “retweet” posts. As a member of the volunteering team, we were expected to upload evidence of our work every week. 

The main challenge was to ensure that our social media pages were in sync, so I put the links in my memo to be up to date with everything published on the platforms, and to remind myself to participate by liking, sharing and commenting.

Through volunteering with BLV, I have learnt that the internet is a very powerful tool that can help change lives from Vietnam to all over the world - every little bit counts to prove the good intentions of anyone living anywhere in the world.