The monitoring mission of AICS’s Office for “Environment and Land Use” – Ufficio V to Vietnam ended on December 9th, 2023. The three-week mission was part of the Office V monitoring activities for the year 2023 and included a week of institutional meetings and documentation analysis at AICS Hanoi Office along with two weeks of on-site/field visits at four project sites.
During the first week, the delegation held meetings with local authorities, including the Ministry of Planning and Investment (MPI), the Department of Water Resources Management (MONRE), and the National Center for Hydro-Meteorological Network of the Ministry of Environment. Besides, the delegation met with some representatives of the donor community, namely the European Delegation, the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, and United Nation Development Programme Office.
During the following two weeks, the delegation visited three projects’ sites accompanied by an MPI official and two team members of AICS Office in Hanoi. The three projects, pertaining to the WA.S.H sector and financed through Italian ODA soft loans, include the “Water Supply in Binh Thuan” project aimed at supplying and distributing potable water, the “Tay Ninh Wastewater Collection and Treatment System” project and the “Urban Sanitation of Nui Thanh, Quang Nam Province” project, both focused on domestic wastewater collection and treatment. The on-site visits were followed by meetings with local authorities, consultants and contractors involved in the execution of the works. The delegation also visited Khanh Hoa and Ninh Thuan provinces, where the second phase of an ODA soft loan project named “Improving Vietnam’s Flood Forecasting and Warning System, Phase II” was completed in late 2020. This latter intervention included a training package for local technicians and the installation of weather monitoring stations at various sites around the province.
During the meetings and briefings, the Italian delegation submitted questionnaires, reviewed project documents, and interviewed authorities, local actors, and stakeholders, adopting various monitoring tools including the Environmental Sustainability Matrix. The monitoring mission helped to assess critical issues and best practices, also providing a valuable opportunity to reflect on the future of the Italian cooperation in Vietnam and the South-East Asia region in the field of water resource management, natural disaster mitigation, and fight against climate change.