Take the survey
For micro-entrepreneurs, household businesses, and smallholders who help make household financial decisions.
Start →Independent public-interest research project · 2025—
From Income to Assets
Vietnam Rural Wealth Progression Project
What prevents rural households and micro-entrepreneurs from converting income into savings, resilience, and productive assets?
Evidence ledger
Targets are not results. A figure counts as progress only when it can be reconciled with supporting evidence.
34
provincial-level units in outreach target
Target600
target household surveys
Target60
target interviews or stories
Target15
target outreach partners
TargetGeography uses the 34 current provincial-level units established under Resolution 202/2025/QH15. Government source ↗
01 · Research frame
A progression, not a single financial product
The research follows five stages. Households can move forward or backward as seasons, health, prices, and shocks change.
01Income
02Emergency buffer
03Resilience
04Productive assets
05Responsible financial tools
02 · Outreach
Three ways to take part
Choose the route that fits. The survey starts with a 60–90 second screener and never asks for bank details, identity numbers, or an exact address.
Share a story
Contribute an anonymous experience with saving, financial shocks, borrowing, or investing in a livelihood.
Start →Refer an organisation
Know a household business, cooperative, or community group that should be heard? Help the two sides connect respectfully.
Start →Become a partner
Support community outreach, challenge the method, host a learning session, or use the findings.
Start →03 · Project record
Progress since January 2025
Historic milestones awaiting evidence are labeled plainly instead of being presented as verified achievements.
01–03/2025
Problem framing
Defined the income-to-assets question, rural household scope, and evidence principles.
04–06/2025
Research design
Designed a shared core and three branches for micro-enterprises, household businesses, and smallholders.
07–12/2025
First listening wave
Historic milestone awaiting reconciliation against outreach records and field evidence.
01–04/2026
Asset-progression synthesis
Synthesized barriers from cash flow and buffers through resilience and productive assets.
05–07/2026
Open tool and feedback
Developed the self-assessment and prepared the community learning session.
08/2026–nay
Nationwide sampling
Opening contributions, recruiting local partners, and publishing the policy notebook.
People & questions
Who the project needs to hear from—and what it needs to learn
The aim is not to collect as many names as possible. Each contribution should test a specific part of the path from income flow to buffers, resilience, and livelihood assets.
People who earn the income
Adults aged 18+ who live or earn a livelihood in a rural area, help make household financial decisions, and are a micro-entrepreneur or trader, household business operator, or smallholder.
This is the household-survey group.
Trusted local connectors
Customers, neighbours, community workers, or supply-chain contacts who can refer a suitable household business, cooperative, farmer group, or trader. Share private contact details only when they have given you permission.
A referral is not an endorsement or a promise of selection.
Learning and outreach partners
Cooperatives, trade groups, community organisations, researchers, civil-society groups, responsible financial providers, or local institutions that can enable access, challenge the instrument, or co-host a learning session.
A partnership is named publicly only after both sides agree.
Five guiding questions
01 · How does income enter the household?
Daily, weekly, monthly, or seasonal income rhythms; volatility; and where business, farm, and household cash flows become mixed.
02 · What breaks the household buffer?
Whether the latest shock was met by savings, spending cuts, asset sales, or debt—and which recurring costs prevent money from being set aside.
03 · Which assets actually protect a livelihood?
Which equipment, storage, livestock, vehicles, inventory, or digital tools create or protect income—and why a priority investment remains delayed.
04 · Which financial tools are suitable and trusted?
When cash, accounts, e-wallets, savings groups, insurance, and credit are used—and what makes a tool useful, confusing, or too risky.
05 · Who can remove the right constraint?
Which changes a household can make itself, and which require action by buyers, suppliers, banks, cooperatives, or local government.
Sampling design
How a voice is selected and situated in the sample
Purposeful sampling suits an early learning phase only when the project discloses its screen, coverage gaps, and limits on inference.
Screen for the defined scope
The household survey is currently for adults with a rural livelihood connection who help make financial decisions. Referrers and organisations outside that screen can still use the Referral or Partner route.
Monitor sample cells, not only totals
Each eligible response is monitored by province, livelihood segment, income pattern, and recruitment channel. Under-heard cells are prioritised in the next outreach wave.
Select interviews for contrast
Follow-up interviews are purposively selected to contrast seasonal and steadier income, different shock responses, and both completed and delayed asset decisions—only among people who consent to recontact.
Do not overclaim representativeness
This is purposeful recruitment through communities and partners. Findings describe participants; they will not be generalised to rural Vietnam without a suitable probability design and weighting.
From one submission to public evidence
- 1. ReceiveA visitor chooses survey, story, referral, or partner and receives an on-page confirmation after a successful submission.
- 2. CheckRecords lacking consent, outside scope, clearly duplicated, or likely spam are held out of analysis; answers are not edited to make the data look cleaner.
- 3. Separate identityOptional contact details are separated from research answers through a response ID. The default analysis export contains no names, phone numbers, or emails.
- 4. Fill gapsThe monitoring table shows which provinces, livelihood groups, and income patterns are missing; the next invitations target those gaps rather than merely growing the total.
- 5. Listen deeplyA small, contrasting set of participants who agreed to recontact is invited to interview, testing interpretation and the mechanisms behind survey responses.
- 6. Return the learningOnly disclosure-safe aggregate patterns, unknowns, and limitations are published, then tested through a learning session, open tool, and policy memo.
After you contribute
What a submission leads to
Intake is in preview. The process below is the operating commitment for launch after data and privacy review.
If you take the survey
Your response enters the de-identified research dataset after quality review. The project contacts you for an interview only if you voluntarily leave a contact channel and opt in.
If you share a story
Your story helps explain mechanisms closed questions cannot capture. It may be quoted anonymously only when you explicitly allow it; research consent does not automatically mean quote consent.
If you refer a business
The project reviews fit, obtains permission before contact or an introduction, and invites the appropriate survey or interview route. A business is not added to a public list merely because it was referred.
If you propose a partnership
Your proposal is triaged for sample access, method review, learning-session support, or use of findings. An exploratory conversation is not presented as a confirmed partnership.
What the opening wave needs
Under-heard participant voices
Seasonal-income households; people who recently faced a health cost, crop loss, or business interruption; and households considering a specific livelihood asset within 24 months.
Permission-based referrals
People who know a suitable trader, household business, cooperative, or farmer group and can ask permission before sharing a contact channel.
Access-enabling partners
Groups that can distribute Vietnamese invitations, offer a neutral venue, assist people with limited digital skills, or test whether questions make sense locally.
Independent method reviewers
Researchers and field practitioners who can identify recruitment bias, leading questions, missing groups, or conclusions that extend beyond the evidence.
Participant safeguards
Boundaries the project will not cross
Research about money and livelihoods can create identification risk, social pressure, and expectations of assistance. These boundaries are part of the method, not fine print.
Contribution-handling commitments
- No identity numbers, bank-account details, exact address, or exact income; the instrument uses bands and broad categories.
- Participation is voluntary; a person may skip or stop. Declining an interview does not invalidate a survey response they consented to provide.
- Aggregates are published only when a group is large enough to reduce re-identification risk; small cells are combined or withheld.
- The project does not broker loans, recommend investments, or promise funding to participants.
- A business referral is treated as a permission-sensitive lead, not public directory data, a quality endorsement, or an established partnership.
Existing evidence, used for the right job
Three portfolio artifacts explain where the project began. They do not prove the new study is complete or that an intervention has delivered impact.
Formative field notes · Mar 2024
Six conversations in a Binh Dinh agricultural community
Used to frame hypotheses about cash, trust, and small transactions. The six accounts were reconstructed from contemporaneous notes, are not representative, and do not count toward the new sample.
Open artifact →Published policy analysis
Vietnam’s rural digital exclusion
Used as a desk-research argument and a source of questions about access, digital capability, and productive use. It does not substitute for household-level evidence in this project.
Open artifact →Policy prototype · not an implementation result
Agent-banking pilot proposal
Used to translate future findings into testable assumptions about service points, trust, and local support. Targets in the proposal are not achieved outcomes.
Open artifact →Decision tool
Open self-assessment
Locate household strengths and gaps along the path from income to assets. This is a learning tool, not financial advice.
Not yetStrong
Not yetStrong
Not yetStrong
Not yetStrong
Focus on the cash-flow foundationStart by mapping the rhythm of income and spending, then build a small regular buffer.
Connect both sides
Refer a business or community group
Suggest a relevant organisation and choose the most respectful connection path. The project never treats a referral as the referred party’s consent.
The referral form is in preview. You can review every question; submission will open when the research intake is live.
Refer a business or community group
Tell the project who should be heard. A referral does not automatically make the referred entity a partner or research participant.
Join the research
Contribute to the research
Participation is voluntary. You may skip a question or stop at any time. Identifying data will not be published. Read the privacy notice ↗
Research preview. You can walk through the complete questionnaire and try each livelihood path. Data submission remains locked until the privacy and data-infrastructure review is complete.