The action plan includes building programs, policies, schemes and projects to fulfil tasks stated in the strategy, which was approved on March 2013.

The strategy is targetted to boost production, hunger eradication and poverty reduction. 

Intensive goods production areas will be planned while policies to attract investment and encourage businesses to utilize ethnic labourers and provide them with vocational training and job opportunities will be developed. 

Policies on supporting disadvantaged ethnic minority people to have land for production and capital to develop household-based production will also be implemented.

The Committee for Ethnic Minority Affairs(CEMA) will devise schemes on building models of sustainable socio-economic development in the north west, the central highlands and the south west.

It will devise plans on boosting socio-economic development for ethnic minority people in the Mekong Delta and on allocating forest land for ethnic minority communities as a source of livelihood and protect the environment sustainably.

The Viet Nam Women’s Union is asked to develop a program on supporting the construction of vocational training models, promoting traditional vocations and improving incomes for ethnic minority women and submit it to the Government in 2014.

The strategy has set a target of developing socio-economic infrastructure in ethnic minority regions. 

It aims to build fundamental socio-economic infrastructure facilities, transport routes to link intensive goods production areas, villages and communes and small-scale bridges to connect different regions and regular power supply while planning, arranging and stabilizing population in combination with developing infrastructure and building new rural areas.

The Ministry of Home Affairs is in charge of building policies and a decree on issuing policies to attract and encourage talents to work in ethnic minority regions.

The strategy also looks to improve capacity building of ethnic minority human resources. Accordingly, ethnic minority students will be prioritized to be trained in an improved network of schools and educational institutions in ethnic minority regions. Polices on supporting ethnic minority students in disadvantaged regions will also be improved.

The Ministry Education and Training will develop five schemes and policies in 2014 on educating ethnic cultural values for ethnic minority students, building a curriculum for ethnic boarding schools, improving Vietnamese language for ethnic minority students, training teachers and educational workers for ethnic minority regions, as well as developing scholarship policies to university ethnic minority students.

The CEMA will develop schemes and policies on supporting socio-economic development of ethnic minority groups, reviewing socio-economic situation in 53 ethnic minority groups and developing several specific policies to support socio-economic development in ethnic minority regions in the 2016-2020 period.

 By Vien Nhu