Local Governance

Vietnam

Local Governance for Poverty Reduction in Vietnam

From 2000 to 2004, Jackson and Associates served as executing agency for the $4.5 million Capacity Development and Enabling Environment Project (CDEEP), funded by CIDA as part of its larger Rural Poverty Reduction Program in two provinces in Vietnam: Thanh Hoa in the north and Soc Trang in the south. CDEEP involved training and institutional strengthening of key provincial and district government departments in management, participatory development and sector programming.

Some highlights of CDEEP’s achievements included:

· engaging more than 1,000 key provincial, district and commune officials in 40 to 50 project activities involving up to nearly 20 local-government agencies, on an annual basis;

· promoting capacity building among women officials (who comprised one third of project participants) to assess and address barriers to their assuming decision-making roles, and publishing a book and video on mainstreaming gender equality in local government;

· testing and rolling out of software and databases for poverty monitoring;

· organizing reflection workshops to introduce project stakeholders to new poverty reduction strategies issued by central government and to discuss the implications of and strategies for local-level implementation associated with these new policies;

· provision of and support to necessary information technology hardware;

· organizing of courses and study tours to promote rural economic development, both on-farm and off-farm;

· training local officials in English-language skills for interacting with foreign agencies and the world economy and in minority languages for better understanding and working with poor minority groups.

When the project closed, one of CDEEP’s local managers was hired by CIDA to work on rural poverty in another province; other key local personnel were engaged by local and international NGOs. All these key staff are women who have assumed progressively more responsible positions in the development field.

Lead Consultants: Paul Turcot and Brian Rowe