VINASME and JICA exchanged technical assistance for small and medium enterprises

On behalf of JICA delegation, Mr. Yamada Tomoyuki - Senior Vice President of Private Sector Development Group, Department of Public Policy and Industrial Development - JICA said: The purpose of this mission is JICA's discussion with Vietnamese agencies on the project to support Vietnamese small and medium enterprises (SME) in the coming period.

The main purpose of the project is to strengthen the capacity of Vietnamese Government agencies in implementing Government plans related to the SME Support Law. JICA is concerned: Who will be interested in this project, who will be the effective project implementer, and the effectiveness of the project must be assessed by the beneficiaries themselves, ie SMEs.

Mr. Tomoyuki Yamada shared, JICA has many proposals to implement the project from the Japanese consultant team but JICA needs to learn more to consider the target content for the project. JICA has worked with a number of government agencies and conducted surveys and consultations with business association organizations.

Mr. To Hoai Nam affirmed that JICA's support activities are very important and necessary. SME needs such support but the action steps must be very specific, the content to be consulted before building program content like this is very useful.

In fact, there are many training programs of ministries and sectors from national budget or international funds for businesses, but low efficiency. This is assessed by specific images: almost all workshops are only busy and crowded in the beginning, and after the break people leave, otherwise they stay but do their own work, not focusing on the workshop content, because businesses do not see their benefits from the workshops.

Even large workshops with many ministries, departments and government officials attended, the number of participating SMEs is very small.

Currently the legal framework is the existing SME Support Law, the decrees and circulars also exist, but most businesses have not been benefited. Specific measures are unclear, lack of practicality. The reason is partly due to the capacity of SMEs, but a large part is due to the way many public officials and employees have not paid close attention. Enterprises do not have specific answers to the problems they need, so they have to accept the “under table” cost solution to get the job done.

Mr. Nam also stated that Vietnamese SMEs are facing the three biggest and most persistent difficulties, namely, stable market, medium-term capital and production and business premises. JICA’s project needs to focus on technical training to improve the capacity of enterprises, from which enterprises are more capable of receiving support sources more effectively.

Being the biggest social-professional organization of Vietnamese SME community, Mr. Nam emphasized: VINASME has the ability to provide all services to support businesses and expresses the desire of JICA to pay attention to VINASME, at least in the consultative steps to build such a program to propose the most practical content, and at the same time be able to contribute opinions and be protected in the JICA support package for Vietnamese SMEs , thereby contributing to protecting the interests of the SME community.

Highly appreciating the role of VINASME, Mr. Yamada Tomoyuki affirmed that JICA will continue to discuss and contact VINASME on the implementation of the SME support project with the aim of ensuring that this business group develops stably and sustainably, contributing more to Vietnam's economic growth.