Vietnam Women's Union

Representatives from provincial agencies, vocational training and job placement centers as well as staffs of Management boards of the province, 8 districts and 12 project communes attended the workshop. The project has been implemented since 1999, with the total budget of 2 billions VND. Phase I & II have been implemented effectively in 18 communes, wards and towns of 10 city, districts. By 31^st March 2008, there are 3,341borrowers with total fund above 4 billions VND.At phase II’s ending, the provincial project management board undertook a survey on the needs of business development in 12 communes, wards, and town in order to carry out phase III. The result shows that most of project members still have difficulties because of unstable materials/inputs, high transportation costs, lack of fund for production activities as well as difficulties in products marketing...

Besides, over 80% of customers want to maintain and expand their business, they are willing to share part of the costs to be able to get good services, to join visits and study tours and to be trained on business start-up, technique and get advanced professional skills…

Phase III (2008 - 2010) aims to reduce the rate of poor households at the project sites, improve capacity for WU staffs who are responsible for credit management and support activities to women for economic development. The loan size has been increased from 2 to 5 millions VND with the duration from 1year to 2years.At the workshop, the participants discussed and agreed about enterprise/business development support activities in this phase, which are: carrying out needs assessment on enterprise/business development; developing and publishing the direction of enterprise/business service providers; promoting relationship/connection between service providers and customers; monitoring and evaluating business support services; setting up model of sharing costs in providing business support services; requesting to have a Fund for business development and technical support.