Addressing an interactive dialogue between the UNDP Executive Board and UN member states held in New York on June 6 on the occasion of the 45th anniversary of the Vietnam - UN relations, the Permanent Representative of Vietnam to the UN pointed out impacts of such global issues as the COVID-19 pandemic, climate change, geo-political tensions, and food and energy crises.
As a speaker at the meeting to share the country’s success story, he said that in this context, the Vietnamese Government has implemented a number of measures to protect people’s health, curb the pandemic, and consistently pursue a policy of “protecting the people’s health first”.
It has allocated substantial social protection coverage to support affected enterprises, workers, and vulnerable groups.
To address both health and socio-economic priorities, the Government has invested intensive efforts in sourcing adequate vaccine supplies. These efforts include the “vaccine diplomacy” strategy to reach out to different sources to ensure adequate vaccine, through COVAX, UN agencies and international partners, enabling the country to carry out the largest vaccination campaign in its history, and thereby achieved a near universal full vaccination by March 2022, Giang noted.
With regard to climate action, he went on, despite constrained fiscal space, the Vietnamese Government has kept in view the longer-term development priorities and made bold commitments at the 26th UN Climate Change Conference (COP26) in 2021 to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. This was followed by the Just Energy Transition Partnership in December 2022 with a pledge of 15.5 billion USD in financing to advance the climate ambition.
Thanks to these timely and efficient policies and strategies, Vietnam has achieved positive results in post pandemic recovery, he said, elaborating that economic growth reached 8.02% in 2022 – the highest in the past 10 years, macroeconomic stability has been ensured and debts sustainably managed, multi-dimensional poverty index reduced by 1.2% compared to 2021, and Vietnam kept its high human development status in 2021.
These results could not be possible without the support of its trusted partners, especially the UNDP, according to the diplomat.
The Government of Vietnam and the UNDP share a thorough understanding of the central importance of government ownership, and of public sector administrative and technical capacity; and the criticality of learning from policy and programmatic experiments, and sharing lessons learned.
“In this regard, we believe that for any partnership to produce tangible results, it should be based on mutual confidence, mutual respect and shared understanding. In conclusion, we fully recognise the important role of the UNDP to support an inclusive, comprehensive and sustainable development for Vietnam, as well as for many other member states,” Ambassador Giang added.
At the dialogue, representatives of the UNDP and countries highly valued Vietnam’s achievements in post-pandemic economic recovery, social security ensuring, and climate change response through appropriate and timely policies, its sharing of experiences in building up self-reliance and independence, and promotion of a strong and effective partnership with UNDP in different aspects of sustainable development.
