Live chat: Vietnam - Women and International Integration
With the desire to create a forum for exchange and sharing thoughts, opinions with readers around this topic on the occasion of International Women's Day - 8th March 2015, the World Bank in
The Live chat has attracted the attention of a broad audience with many interesting questions for panelists before and during the chat.
Answering the questions from readers, Ms. Nguyen Thi Thanh Hoa, President of the Vietnam Women’s Union (VWU) - an organization representing legal and legitimate rights and interests of Vietnamese women, said that barriers hindering Vietnamese women’s international integration are lack of awareness in the society and among women themselves about women’s role and position; a number of policies have not yet created opportunities for women; the quality of female human resources in general is limited; and especially the housework burden. In order to remove these barriers, the Party and State of Vietnam should promote information and communication activities, issue specific policies to support women in balancing work and life, as well as develop relevant training and retraining programs for women...
VWU President also highlighted that "Globalization and international integration have two side impacts on women’s political participation. It accelerates the dynamism and innovation of Vietnamese women and helps them learn experiences and improve their education level on the one hand. on the other hand, it also requires women to be more capable, daring, decisive and confident to capture opportunities, overcome challenges in the integration process. The most needed qualities in women are self-confidence and courage to absorb the good and the newness without losing the inherited fine traditions". As a result, the education level of female staff has been raised dramatically, specifically the percentage of female staff holding master degrees is over 30%, many of them have won national and international awards... However, the education level of female staff is still uneven, particularly at local level.
Sharing some of VWU activities for women’s economic empowerment, Ms. Nguyen Thi Thanh Hoa said that the VWU has been running programs promoting women in economic development for over 20 years and has provided support for over 2.8 million turns of women to date. Particularly, micro-credit activities have witnesses great progress. In addition, the VWU has also been developing cooperative, cooperative group models to enable women to provide mutual assistance in poverty alleviation, economic development as well as for piloting micro-insurance models... These activities have contributed to lowering national poverty rate.
