Speeches Shim
In partnership with the global healthcare company Novartis, the USAID Improving Access, Curriculum and Teaching in Medical Education and Emerging Diseases (IMPACT-MED) Alliance has trained nearly 2500 final-year medical students at 10 Vietnamese medical schools on COVID-19 care and treatment. Since discovering new COVID-19 cases in the central city of Danang on July 25, Vietnam is addressing a surge of new cases around the country. This marks the end of a 99-day streak without any new local transmission cases. Following the Ministry of Health’s decision to mobilize health workers, including medical students, to participate in the COVID-19 response, the Danang Department of Health has enlisted 700 senior students who were trained through USAID IMPACT-MED at Hue University of Medicine and Pharmacy and Danang University of Medical and Pharmacological Techniques. These frontline workers will work at Danang-area hospitals to help deliver care and treatment services to COVID-19 patients.
Through Vietnam’s Payment for Forest Environmental Services (PFES) system, designed with USAID support, downstream forest service users, including hydropower companies, pay upstream communities for protecting watersheds so that those companies have stable water supply to produce electricity. Since PFES was first piloted in 2008, it has generated approximately $600 million, and payments to rural forest owners have been primarily made in cash. Over the past two years, USAID’s Vietnam Forests and Deltas (VFD) program worked with ViettelPay and Vietnam’s Forest Protection and Development Fund to introduce e-payments via mobile phones to rural communities for protecting forests.
In recent times, the practice of burning vegetation, combined with prolonged dry weather and strong southwest monsoon winds, has resulted in an increase in forest fires in Quang Nam (QN) and Thua Thien Hue (TT Hue) provinces. This issue is also exacerbated by the fact that many forest owners do not implement forest fire prevention strategies, such as setting up firebreaks to act as a barrier to spreading wildfires. In order to improve local capacity to prevent and fight forest fires, the USAID Green Annamites project conducted a training needs assessment. Based on its results, from June 2-17, USAID organized six training courses in QN and TT Hue provinces on forest fire prevention and fighting regulations, forest fire forecasting, drafting action plans, organizing and coordinating forest fire prevention and fighting forces, and inspection and supervision in forest fire response.
One of the biggest barriers to disability support and benefits is not having the disability certified by concerned authorities. To address this, USAID’s Disability Rights Enforcement, Coordination, and Therapies (DIRECT) project is training certifying officials and helping persons with disabilities obtain disability certificates so they can apply for disability benefits. Over the last few months, USAID’s DIRECT project has supported training events for 610 members of local disability classification councils in Binh Phuoc province on how to classify disability severity under government regulations. As a result, around 2,900 new beneficiaries were awarded with social security disability insurance.
To help Vietnamese manufacturers overcome disruptions in global supply chains caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, on July 23, the USAID Linkages for Small and Medium Enterprises (USAID LinkSME) project and the Vietnam Association for Supporting Industries (VASI), a leading Vietnamese business support organization, held the “Manufacturing Matchmaking Event 2020” in Hanoi. The event served as a platform to strengthen linkages between lead firms sourcing in Vietnam and Vietnamese small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in local supply chains. Lead firms such as VinFast, Thaco, Panasonic Vietnam, Samsung Vietnam, Ford Vietnam, and Mitsubishi Motors Vietnam connected with more than 60 local SMEs in the metals, electrical, electronics, plastics, rubber, and automation sectors. Local suppliers marketed their products, built business relationships with lead firms, and shared information on new developments and technology in the manufacturing industry.
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