UNCDF Extends its Long History of Support to the Government of Viet Nam in the area of Local Governance and Local Development

UNCDF assistance in the provinces of Da Nang and Quang Nam has lead to the construction of thousands of locally-determined infrastructure projects, such as this public market Hoa Phong. Photo by Adam Rogers/UNCDF.

BANGKOK, February 22, 2005 - Building on its long experience in supporting development efforts in Viet Nam, the UN Capital Development Fund will provide technical services to design a major multi-donor programme in support of pro-poor local planning and service delivery reforms throughout Viet Nam. The aim of this programme is to support implementation of Vietnam's Comprehensive Growth and Poverty Reduction Strategy (the national PRSP) and the Tenth National Development Plan.

Technical services are to be provided through a contract awarded to UNCDF by the lead donor in this programme, Britain's Department for International Development (DFID), following UNCDF's winning of a competitive tendering process.

This exercise will itself complement and help leverage the much smaller Strengthening Local Government Project project - currently under appraisal - to be funded by UNCDF, DFID and the UN Development Programme. This new initiative, follows a request to UNCDF by the Ministry of Planning and Investment to extend the local piloting initiated earlier in Quang Nam Province under the Rural Infrastructure Development Facility to two other Provinces, while also adapting the approach to Viet Nam's fast-evolving decentralization policy framework.

Kadmiel Wekwete, director of UNCDF's Local Development Unit, said he sees this initiative as "a major opportunity for UNCDF to re-establish its presence and its role as technical innovating agency in Viet Nam and - in so doing - to consolidate its partnership with both the Vietnamese Government and with DFID."

UNCDF has been active in Viet Nam since 1978, with early programmes concentrating on assisting the country with the development of its rural infrastructure. UNCDF assistance to Viet Nam began with a small project to provide funds for machinery that the government needed to construct a dam in Phu Ninh; this led to an integrated rural infrastructure programme and then, in turn, to the demand-driven Rural Infrastructure Development Facility. In this transition, as its programmes evolved toward supporting the institutions and organizations that make development possible, UNCDF began placing more emphasis on assisting local and provincial governments to institute improved, more transparent and participatory procedures for financing, planning and delivering local public goods and to transfer the responsibilities and resources for rural development to the lowest levels of public administration (communes and districts). The success of the local development approach pioneered by UNCDF is seen in its widespread replication by major donors in Viet Nam, in its partial adoption in Government's own targeted programmes, and now in the responsibility assigned to UNCDF through the contract awarded by DfID.

For more information on UNCDF's programmes in Viet Nam, please visit the Viet Nam Country Page.