Source: cema.gov.vn
These are the findings of the Human Development Report 2016, entitled ‘Human Development for Everyone’, released by UNDP on April 26th 2017 in Hanoi at the conference “Accelerating Ethnic Minority Development – Leave no one behind”.
At the conference, Ms. Luise Chamberlain, Country Director of UNDP Vietnam, highlighted the following three points for consideration:
Firstly, regarding the access to data, and analysis of data, to inform policy development and implementation: It is good that the survey generated new disaggregated data, but it is more important that the data will be accesible and used by concerned stakeholders, policy researchers, policy makers and the public for analysis and monitoring. Development partners, strongly encourage the free and open access of the 2015 survey data to enable access by all stakeholders.
The availability and accessibility of the data, without hinder of bureaucracy or cost, will enable much more in-depth analysis by different stakeholders and researchers, and thus will provide policy makers with more rich information and evidence-based recommendation.
Members of the Ethnic Minority Working Group consisting of Development Partners and NGOs stand ready to conduct in-depth analysis of the survey data for making policy recommendations on several topics, should they have access to the survey’s data.
Secondly, as the Global Human Development pointed out: the causes of “left-behind” are not well understood, there is an urgent need for much more in-depth analysis of the available data. For example: the data shows that early marriage is at a high level of 26.6% among ethinc minority groups, with some exceptional cases as O Du (73%), Mong (59.7%) or Xinh Mun (56.3%).
More in-depth analysis should be conducted to examine the two-way relationships between this phenomenon and the low level of ethnic minority women’s education and girl’s access to school, job opportunities as well as health care and family planning services, resulting in these ethnic minority women and girls being excluded from opportunities in all these areas.
Such analysis could therfore help answer the question whether additional policy intervention tailored to address the early marriage issues among these ethnic minority groups are warranted in addition to the current policies and programs.
Thirdly, it is vital to improve our understanding of the core causes of being “left behind”, especially in terms of which and how stereotypes – particularly, if I may, discriminatory attitudes, behaviors and practices that prevent ethnic minority people, especially women from becoming more active in their communities.
New data, especially qualitative information/ethnic minority people’s perceptions can also help shed light on how such stereotypes affect the ability of current policies and programs to be more effective and achieve their goals, and to inform the formulation and implementation of additional measures./.