DICE PhD student Trang Nguyen has been listed as one of the BBC’s Women of 2019 alongside climate change activist Greta Thunberg, congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and captain of the US National Women’s Football team Megan Rapinoe.
Trang grew up in Vietnam, confronted from a young age with monkeys chained up for sale on the streets and bears held in captivity to extract bile for traditional medicine. In 2015 she embarked upon a PhD in Biodiversity Management at the Durrell Institute of Conservation and Ecology (DICE) and set up WildAct Vietnam, a non-profit organisation which helps authorities monitor illegal wildlife trade markets.
“It is an honour to be included in the list. I received an email from the BBC a few months ago stating that someone had nominated me and asking me to send a short paragraph of myself and a picture. But that was it. They didn’t say whether I was shortlisted, so I thought they were only requesting information to do some background checking. When I saw that my supervisor, Dr David Roberts, had tweeted that I was included in the BBC’s 100 Women of 2019, it came as a huge surprise!
“As a female conservationist working in a country like Vietnam, where women are still being looked down upon by men, as well as subjected to gender-based violence whilst working in the field, me and my organisation WildAct Vietnam is hoping to tackle this issue and create a fairer and safer working environment for women in wildlife conservation.
“I have always had a huge passion for wildlife and, since I was eight years old, it was my dream – to become a conservationist. In the last few years, I have been very lucky, having received many international awards, such as the Future for Nature (an award for wildlife conservationists under the age of 35), alongside being shortlisted for Community and Public Service in the Women of the Future Southeast Asia and included in the Forbes Vietnam 30 Under 30 list.
“I hope that the recognition and attention comes from being listed as one of the BBC’s 100 Women of 2019 will help raise awareness around gender-based violence in wildlife conservation, as well as raising awareness in Vietnam about wildlife conservation: sadly, even now, many people still think that wildlife conservation is not a ‘real’ job or they think that conservation is exclusively for white men, who are rich and have time on their hands. At WildAct Vietnam, we created two courses for Masters’ students in Vietnam on Combating Illegal Wildlife Trade and Captive Animal Welfare where I hope to build national expertise in the subject area. And it is no doubt that being included in this list is a way of proving to Vietnamese society that a Vietnamese woman can also be a wildlife conservationist too!
“People need to put aside their prejudices and work together to gain a better understanding of the issues of conservation and create solutions for the problems that will be effective and long lasting. For the future of nature conservation, it is important that women’s voices are heard and their actions are recognised.”
The BBC’s 100 Women team drew up a shortlist based on names gathered by them and suggested by the BBC’s network of World Service languages teams. They were looking for candidates who had made the headlines or influenced important stories over the past 12 months, as well as those who have inspiring stories to tell, achieved something significant or influenced their societies in ways that wouldn’t necessarily make the news. The pool of names was then assessed against this year’s theme – the Female Future – and measured for regional representation and due impartiality, before the final 100 were chosen.