Gender Review Report: Royal Norwegian Embassy Viet Nam

This Gender Review has been carried out on request from the Embassy in Hanoi (the Embassy) and through desk studies and discussions with Embassy staff and management and partners in Viet Nam (25 – 29 October 2010).

Key findings

• Although Viet Nam scores relatively high on many gender relevant indicators and indexes, many challenges remain pertaining to e.g. vulnerability of female-headed households to poverty; women working longer hours than men and for less pay; women’s limited access to resources such as land, property and formal credit and job training; and poor representation in decision-making positions, particularly at the local level. Traditional concepts of women as the embodiment of harmony within the family also constitute a challenge. Domestic violence, including sex selective abortion, is a widespread problem.
• Inequalities are compounded by factors such as gender and ethnicity and women belonging to ethnic minorities fare generally worse than Kinh women in terms of development. The Embassy has a strong awareness of the challenges facing ethnic minorities and this is one of the priority areas in the UNICEF programme on mother tongue based bilingual education, supported by the Embassy, and is also one of the key focus areas for the cooperation within the human rights work of the “Group of Four” (Canada, New Zealand, Switzerland and Norway). It is important to keep the challenges of compounding inequalities (e.g. discrimination on the basis of both ethnic minority status and gender) on the agenda also in relation to other parts of the portfolio (e.g. UN-REDD, One UN).
• The Embassy’s portfolio includes strong components for women’s rights and gender equality, in particular in relation to the annual bilateral human rights dialogue and the strategic partnership with Norwegian Church Aid/NAV. However, the review of the four projects included in this exercise and the statistics generated on the use of the OECD/DAC gender policy marker indicates that there is a potential for improving the integration of gender in other sectors of the portfolio. This pertains in particular to the more technical sectors.
• Climate change has emerged as a key headline also in Viet Nam and climate change and in particular UN REDD is a priority area for the Embassy in the years to come. The Embassy’s request that the UN-REDD improve the integration of gender in their framework in Viet Nam is a very important initiativ and the Embassy deserves credit for having raised the issue. The global UN-REDD framework is to a great extent
  gender blind and if UN-REDD in Viet Nam can contribute to developing frameworks and initiatives that better integrates women’s rights, participation and gender equality in programmes and safeguards (and measure the impact of this), this could set an example for other UN-REDD pilots. Norway can make a difference by contributing to this.