Vietnam Women's Union

Promotion of microfinance activities to further support women in Viet Nam

28/03/2018

With the goal to contribute to poverty reduction and economic development by providing financial services for poor and low-income households as well as capacity building for VWU staff at different levels, the VWU, the Savings Foundation for International Cooperation - SBFIC (Germany) and the Center for Agricultural and Rural Development -CARD (the Philippines) signed the Project agreement “Savings banks partnership project to strengthen the regional microfinance network in Vietnam, Lao PDR, and Myanmar (Regional Project)” for the 2018 – 2021 period.

This is a follow-up of the first phase which was implemented from January, 2015 to March, 2018. In this phase, the Project focuses on the restructure and integration of the Fund for Poor Women into TYM, improving the capability of the microfinance clients to utilize financial services (including microfinance and microinsurance)...

In her remarks at the signing ceremony, VWU President Nguyen Thi Thu Ha highly appreciates SBFIC and CARD for their valuable financial and technical support as well as effective approaches and methods in implementing microfinance activities introduced to VWU over the past years. She expects that experts from the two institutions will collaborate closely with VWU staff to identify the strengths and weaknesses of VWU in microfinance sector in order to identify a plan of VWU’s microfinance institutions on the basis of sustainable development in the future since microfinance has been identified one of the strengths and key tasks of VWU in women’s economic development, including its Strategy on microfinance. The President shares that the VWU has recommended the Ministry of Education and Training to incorporate financial education for children into school curriculum and hopes that this initiative would be shared with the support from of the German Savings Banks once the idea is applied in Vietnam.

SFBIC Executive Director Niclaus Bergmann expresses his pleasure in seeing the progress and growth of TYM not only in terms of outreach, but also in the scope of services-loans for MSE’s, wide range of savings services, business development services and many social and training activities. TYM has changed its role in the SBFIC’s Project-from main beneficiary of our assistance to a model for the entire VWU in its new role.

He also highly appreciates the Viet Nam Women’s Academy for its Microfinance Training Center which is on a very good way to become a leading microfinance training provider in the country.

He affirms that the SBFIC will continue supporting the VWU to implement specific activities by providing experience and ideas and believes in fruitful cooperation between the two organizations in the future, especially in the next 3 years of the project implementation.