Manh Chinh Nguyen

Growing up in Ha Giang, one of Vietnam’s most remote mountain provinces, Chinh experienced firsthand how unequal access to information limits opportunity. Determined to change that, he founded his hometown’s first English club as a high school student and later organized Model United Nations conferences at the Diplomatic Academy of Vietnam, where he earned his Bachelor's degree to open doors for young people who, like him, came from the margins of Vietnam's civic life.

Over the past six years, Chinh has worked at the intersection of governance, transparency, and community empowerment. At Towards Transparency, Vietnam’s national contact of Transparency International, he led communications strategy, coordinated public campaigns with youth integrity networks across Vietnam. At Habitat for Humanity Vietnam, he co-founded the organization’s first Advocacy Committee and engaged provincial authorities on housing rights for marginalized communities.

As the first Vietnamese fellow at CRISP Berlin under Germany’s CrossCulture Programme, he expanded his expertise into simulation-based peacebuilding — developing tools on anticorruption, media literacy, and youth policy that were later used to train educators across Europe and Central Asia.

After years of translating complex policy issues into public conversations, Chinh understands that AI governance is not simply a technical challenge but a deeply human one. As a Rotary Peace Fellow, he is determined to help communities, governments, and civil society build shared frameworks for a technology already reshaping how people access truth, participate in governance, and experience justice — and to return to Vietnam to help shape a future where every community, no matter how remote, has a voice in those decisions.