Quang Tri, August 2026. The Embassy of Ireland has awarded a grant of €257,927 to RENEW Centre for Rehabilitation and Disability Support to continue victim assistance, disability support, and explosive ordnance risk education across Quang Tri and Quang Ngai provinces. The grant covers the twelve months from 1 August 2026 to 31 July 2027.
Ambassador Deirdre Ní Fhallúin and RENEW Director Nguyen Hieu Trung signed the contract this month. Of the total, €225,927 supports activities in Quang Tri and €31,000 supports activities in Quang Ngai, where RENEW has worked since 2019.
A Continuing Partnership
The Embassy of Ireland has funded RENEW’s risk education work since 2015 and added support for survivors and people with disabilities in 2016. That funding has continued each year since, now under the program “Victim Assistance/Disability Support and Explosive Ordnance Risk Education toward a safe community from explosive ordnance risk,” part of the Embassy’s 2023–2027 strategy in Vietnam.
RENEW’s management team and Chuck Searcy with Irish Ambassador Deirdre Ní Fhallúin and Head of Development Cooperation Edel Cribbin at the event marking 20 years of Ireland-Vietnam partnership for sustainable development, Hanoi, 25 June 2026.
“I would like to thank you and your team for your commitment to this project,” Ambassador Ní Fhallúin wrote to RENEW ahead of the signing. “I look forward to a continued fruitful partnership with RENEW Centre.”
Ireland’s support sits alongside contributions from the Vietnamese government and RENEW’s other international partners, including Norwegian People’s Aid, in a partnership that dates to Project RENEW’s founding in 2001.
What the Grant Supports
The funding continues two lines of work RENEW has built side by side for more than two decades.
The first is risk education: teaching people, and especially children, to recognize explosive ordnance and report it rather than move it. RENEW has reached more than 342,000 boys, girls, men and women in Quang Tri to date.
The second is direct support for survivors and people with disabilities. This includes prosthetics and assistive devices that RENEW has provided to 3,149 persons with disabilities, along with rehabilitation and vocational training that helps a person rebuild a livelihood after an accident.
A Family in Khe Sanh
Hồ Văn Y is one of the people that second kind of support is for. He lost a leg at seventeen, in an explosion while working in a coffee garden in the Khe Sanh area. Today he lives in Ruong Village with his wife and their three sons, in a stilt house with four breeding cows on the hillside around it.
On 28 May 2026, Edel Cribbin, Head of Development Cooperation at the Embassy of Ireland, visited the family at home, one of many families affected by postwar UXO who are rebuilding their lives with assistance from RENEW.
Edel Cribbin, Head of the International Development Programme at the Embassy of Ireland, visits the family of Hồ Văn Y in Ruong Village, Khe Sanh, on 28 May 2026.
Join Our Mission
Every device removed and every survivor supported depends on partners who stay for the long term. RENEW Centre thanks the Embassy of Ireland, and the people of Ireland, for their continued trust.
To learn more about RENEW’s work in Quang Tri and Quang Ngai, or to support it, visit landmines.org.vn.
This project is funded by the Government of Ireland’s International Development Programme through the Embassy of Ireland in Hanoi.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of RENEW Centre and do not necessarily represent or reflect the views of the Government of Ireland or the Embassy of Ireland.
