Viet Nam has successfully completed its national development plan and set up an effective monitoring and evaluation system to watch over official Development Assistance (ODA) usage, world leading banking institutions said at the third international roundtable on managing for development results in Ha Noi on Feb. 6.

Viet Nam’s five-year (2006 - 2010) plan has been basically accepted by the donors’ community as the framework for providing support for the government’s investment programmes, noted James W. Adams, Vice President of the World Bank (WB).

“This does not happen in every country,” Adams told a Viet Nam News Agency reporter on the sidelines of the roundable dubbed “Managing for Development Results”.

At the closing session of the last Consultative Group Meeting on December 15, 2006, the WB and the Asian Development Bank (ADB) pledged to provide Viet Nam more than 2 billion USD in total.

According to WB Vice President Adams, the donor’s community gave the country’s plan its broad support partly because the Government of Viet Nam has been reaching out and discussing with its people from all walks of life during the process of sketching out its development plan.

In addition to it, success in preparing its development plan, Viet Nam was also applauded for its efforts in monitoring ODA usage.

“Viet Nam has set up a monitoring and evaluation system” to be able to determine what measures should be taken to ensure the quality of ODA management, said ADB Vice President Lawrence Greenwood.

“The Vietnamese leadership is showing a great deal of result in addressing corruption and they have taken up very impressive steps,” the ADB Vice President noted, adding, “we are very impressed by those efforts”.

Both of the two leading officials confirmed that the ADB and WB will remain committed to working with Viet Nam through continued financial support, of which a large portion will be spent on capacity building.

According to the Vice President Adams, the WB will provide an annual aid worth over 800 million USD in long-term non-interest credits to Viet Nam. Up to 10-15 percent of the credit will be used to support the country’s capacity building efforts.

The 3rd international roundable brought together more than 400 experts and government officials from 40 countries worldwide, 33 aid and donor agencies, and around 30 non-governmental organisations and private companies to join discussions about measures to improve the results attained with the support of development aid.

Director General Xu Lin of the Department of Fiscal and Financial Affairs - an expert from China, which was praised to be a prominent example for result-based strategic development planning, has been invited to deliver the keynote speech at the roundtable. His speech brought to the audience China’s recent achievements in its planning process, and the crucial role of leadership and political commitment in that process.

Source: VNA