The integration of Vietnam into global economy, WTO accession has created more opportunities for economic development but has also brought along sides many negative impacts on environment and social issues. In another context, Vietnam joined in the list of Middle Income Country (MIC) in 2011. This pace in one hand shows the outstanding progress Vietnam could make in the last decades, but also bring new challenges to the development sectors, including NGOs. The MIC status of Vietnam implies a decreasing attention on poverty reduction, shifting towards increasing investment on economic growth. All these changes consequently result to new dynamic and changing natures of poverty in Vietnam.

In order to cope with the changing context, it is required that CSOs in Vietnam need to be more active, and play more challenging role in poverty reduction and contribute to ensuring social justice. This requires a transformation of CSOs, both in terms of working approach and implementation modality. It is expected that, CSOs in Vietnam should not solely be the implementer of charitable activities or service delivery projects, but need to contribute more actively to the policy making and implementation process. 

Recognizing the increasing role of local NGOs in dealing with new challenges in poverty reduction, SRD has responding quickly, in order to maintain its relevance in the changing context. Since the last few years and, SRD paid strong investment in strengthening its capacity on research and advocacy works.

SRD considers evidence based advocacy as the major approach for our policy recommendations. The primary focus in our advocacy strategy is to deepen our works at grass root levels to gain practical experience and bring feasible impacts. In order to draw lessons learned from local experiences, bringing communities' voice to higher level of policies makers,  we strengthen our expertise on researches and intensify documentations of local good practices.

These researches will provide SRD also actively engage in networking and advocacy forums to strengthen the organization advocacy capacity.