Dear visitors to Mark’s blog,

I am happy to be a guest blogger on Mark’s site while he is on leave. I work for the Department for International Development (DFID) and am the new Deputy Head of the Office here in Hanoi. I arrived ten weeks ago with my wife and two little boys. We came here after spending three years in Ghana, West Africa. There’s not much similarity between the two countries, I must say.  Aside from the tropical climate, I have only spotted one other commonality: a star in the middle of the national flag (Ghana is known as the black star of Africa because it was the first African country that gained independence from colonialism).

Now I would like to use this opportunity to tell you a bit about international development, another part of work of the British Government here in Vietnam. I think that now is a particularly exciting time to be in Vietnam as a development partner. The high rates of growth in recent years are quickly propelling Vietnam to middle-income country status. This has important implications for DFID and other development partners. It signals the transition from a relationship based on large amounts of financial support towards a more mature relationship in which financial transfers play a lesser role.

In the case of the UK, we are increasingly focusing our support on those services, like sanitation and HIV/AIDS, where Vietnam is not on track to achieve the internationally agreed Millennium Development Goals. We are also focussing on a number of key areas that are crucial for the development of any country, including Vietnam, and that are independent of income levels. These include analysing the impact of the current economic crisis and strengthening processes and institutions that aim to improve accountability, such as State Audit of Vietnam and Transparency International.

Early this month, our Minister launched a new White Paper, titled ‘Building Our Common Future’, which outlines the UK’s future priorities for international development. I realise a lot of connections between the emerging focus on “moving beyond aid financing” in Vietnam with the recent announcement in the White Paper. We had a broad discussion in the office and with Embassy colleagues about this publication and its possible implications for our work in Vietnam. We agreed that new challenges have come to the fore in the recent past that could threaten the good progress that has been made on growth and poverty reduction in Vietnam and elsewhere around the globe. The current economic crisis is one such threat; the impact of climate change is another. We need to work together on these challenges as they cannot be solved by any country alone.

With all these changes afoot, I think that the next few years will be important  in terms of revisiting the relationship between Vietnam and its development partners to ensure that we work together to address these new challenges. And I am therefore really excited to be part of this process at this critical time!

That’s it from me for now. I might not have a chance to communicate with you again until Mark’s next leave, so if you are interested in learning more about our development work, please visit our website or feel free to contact me at DFID’s Hanoi office.

All the best!

Christian Rogg - Deputy Head of the DFID in Hanoi

Notes for Editors

See also British Ambassador's Vietnamese language blog

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