Japan’s ISA to form strategic alliance with Vietnamese GPA

ISA is Japan’s leading educational service provider offering English-speaking camps and mid-term, long-term study aboard programmes to middle and high-school students with approximately 25,000 student enrollments per year. GPA is one of Vietnam’s leading providers of college counseling, summer camps and academic English training based in Hanoi.

GPA said it will use the capital invested by ISA to reinforce the quality of its domestic summer camp and outdoor camps, create a comprehensive international camp programme, expand its English training programs, and build the capacity to help more students prepare for college and career abroad.

Hien Dao, founder and CEO of GPA said “With this partnership, our goal is to give Vietnamese students access to a broad range of short-term study abroad and summer camp opportunities in English speaking countries such as the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the UK, where ISA has operations. This will also open up a two-way exchange of students between Vietnam and Japan, a country for which we have much admiration and an affinity with in terms of values and work ethic.”

“Our investment in GPA is strategically important as shown by the fact that ISA has never before formed an alliance through investment,” said Atsushi Ikegame, senior managing director of ISA. “Through the partnership with GPA, we will be able to create new opportunities to help nurture more motivated, talented Vietnamese and Japanese youth who can play an active role in a globalising world. The partnership really reinforces our commitment on pursuing ISA’s mission to foster self-sufficient people with a future vision coupled with competence in a global society. ”

The partnership with ISA will help GPA to provide Vietnamese students with access to a variety of camps and study abroad programmes organised by ISA in Japan, the US, Canada, Australia and other countries and in the other way around, to provide Japanese students with access to summer camps and exchange programmes organised by GPA in Vietnam.

Both parties also plan to organise camps and programmes in Southeast Asia for both Vietnamese and Japanese students.

GPA employs 70 full-time employees and more than 250 teachers, coaches, and camp counselors on a part-time basis. GPA’s mission is to help Vietnamese students become global citizens. With a deep understanding of and passion for advanced education systems that value students’ holistic development, GPA contributes to improving the Vietnamese education system by promoting experiential learning, or ‘learning by doing’, and pioneering academic and personal development programmes that incorporate 21^st Century skills to enhance students’ competencies.

ISA was founded in 1970 and is one of the Japanese educational service providers with the longest business history in the industry. From the very beginning, it has focused on producing talented youth through study-abroad programs and English communication training programmes. The company is based in Tokyo with 10 branch offices throughout Japan.