The USAID Sustainable HIV and Tuberculosis Response from Technical Assistance (SHIFT) project strengthens and delivers innovative enhancements in HIV and Tuberculosis (TB) services and helps transition the HIV/AIDS response to host country ownership through targeted technical assistance in six provinces in Vietnam in order to accomplish the country’s ambitious “90-90-90” targets. SHIFT is expected to accomplish this purpose by providing direct service delivery and technical assistance on HIV and TB to the Vietnam Authority of HIV/AIDS Control and the National TB Program, as well as other key local stakeholders in priority provinces, to ensure successful transition from USAID-supported HIV and TB services to the provincial government by the end of the project.
Specialized inspection is a customs clearance procedure in Vietnam implemented by line ministries on import and export of goods. Currently, overlapping specialized inspections by different ministries consume 70% of clearance time, causing unnecessary delay in customs clearance. On December 25-27, the USAID Trade Facilitation Program supported the General Department of Vietnam Customs (GDVC) to organize a workshop for a focus working group in charge of a draft scheme to reform specialized inspections.
The Convention on International Trade of Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES)-listed species are particularly vulnerable to illegal trade. Vietnam’s CITES permitting system for compliant trade in wildlife is still manual and paper-based, which complicates Vietnam Customs’ ability to control imports, exports, and customs clearance and ultimately slows permit verification, facilitating commercial misconduct in wild fauna and flora imports and exports. To help Vietnam tackle this challenge, the USAID Saving Species project is supporting the Vietnam CITES Management Authority (CITES Vietnam) to develop E-CITES, an online tool for issuing electronic CITES permits and managing the CITES implementation database which is interconnected with other systems, including those of Vietnam Customs.
Vietnam is finalizing its first ever Public-Private Partnership (PPP) Law, which aims to tackle the country's current budget constraints by securing private capital from PPPs to meet its sustainable infrastructure needs. USAID has been providing Vietnam’s National Assembly (NA) as well as the Ministry of Planning and Investment (MPI) with technical drafting support, private sector input, and research and analysis on some critical topics to draft the law. To ensure that the draft PPP Law is rooted in international best practice, USAID invited Professor Akash Deep, a global authority on PPPs and faculty chair of the Infrastructure in a Market Economy Executive Program at Harvard University, to Vietnam from December 17-20.
In July 2019, the World Health Organization (WHO) recommended a fixed dose combination of Tenofovir–Lamivudine–
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Last updated: January 16, 2020
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