About CO-Hanoi

Viet Nam rejoined the ILO in 1992 and the ILO Country Office was opened in Hanoi in 2003. The main aims of the ILO in Viet Nam are to promote rights at work, encourage decent employment opportunities, enhance social protection and strengthen dialogue on work-related issues.

Working in partnership with the Government of Viet Nam, especially the Ministry of Labour, Invalids and Social Affairs, the Viet Nam General Confederation of Labour, the Viet Nam Chamber of Commerce and Industry, and the Viet Nam Cooperative Alliance, the ILO has offered support through policy advice, capacity building and technical cooperation to open opportunities for women and men to gain access to better jobs and have a voice in the decisions that affect their lives.

Among the key issues that the country has been cooperating with the ILO are green jobs, skills development, labour statistics, industrial relations development, occupational safety and health and social security. International labour standards and gender equality are viewed as cross-cutting issues being mainstreamed in all the above key issues under the framework of cooperation between the ILO and our tripartite constituents.

The ILO in Viet Nam is now helping Viet Nam implement the 2012-16 Decent Work Country Programme, a continuation of the first decent work country cooperation framework which covered the period between 2006 and 2010. With the technical assistance from the ILO, the 2006-10 programme successfully resulted in a more effective social dialogue between the Government and the organisations of workers and employers, sound industrial relations promoting better working conditions, and improved competitiveness in key economic sectors.

The 2012-16 Decent Work Country Programme has been fully incorporated into the One United Nations Plan for the same period. It was developed by the ILO and our tripartite constituents as a solid platform for Viet Nam to explore possible responses to the challenges, including those it is now facing as a middle-income country. It focuses on three major strategic areas – employment and sustainable enterprise development; social protection and social security; and labour market governance. All the three areas reflect Viet Nam’s central goal of human-centred and sustainable development. It also aims to improve the quality of the national economic growth through high quality of human resources, decent employment and sustainable enterprise development

A Decent Work Country Programme Steering Committee, established in May 2012, is chaired by the Minister of Labour, Invalids and Social Affairs and composed of presidents of the employers’ and workers’ organisations and the Director of the ILO Viet Nam.

With the time-frame 2012-16 the DWCP is also designed to support relevant priorities of Vietnam’s Socio-Economic Development Plan as well as it is aimed to support Viet Nam’s goal to become a “modern-oriented industrialized nation” by 2020.