Women should be at centre of every recovery, development effort: Vice President

Addressing the summit’s opening ceremony, Vice President Xuan underlined women’s comprehensive role in and enormous contributions to common efforts to contain the COVID-19 pandemic and respond to its negative impacts.

However, she noted, women and girls are also the ones suffering the most from the pandemic and facing the risk of lagging behind after the pandemic.

To achieve a peaceful, prosperous, humane, and sustainable world, the Vice President underlined the need to promote women’s role and full and equal participation in keeping national and international peace and security, especially in preventing conflicts and resolving non-traditional challenges, thus creating a solid foundation for transforming economies.

Women should be placed at the centre of every socio-economic recovery and development effort in the post-pandemic period. They need to be given all possible conditions to access resources and knowledge, apply science and technology, and acquire skills for starting business and developing a digital economy, according to Xuan.

She held that it is necessary to improve women’s digital access and application, bring into play their role in building a digital economy with green, inclusive, and sustainable growth, in tandem with the realisation of the Sustainable Development Goals.

She suggested the summit establish a fund or annual awards for honouring excellent initiatives to ensure gender diversity in business leadership, and for women who run micro-, small-, and medium-sized enterprises or greatly contribute to society, the pandemic fight, and environmental protection.

The Vice President also called for enhancing the role and improving operations of women’s networks in various areas and at all levels so that women can connect, share experience, seek partners, and assist one another more easily.

Highlighting Vietnamese women’s significant role and major contributions to the country throughout history, she noted women are accounting for 30.26% of deputies to the country’s incumbent National Assembly (the highest %age over the last 45 years), 50% of the key positions in ministries and ministry-level agencies, and 26.5% of the business owners (ranking sixth in the world in terms of the rate of women entrepreneurs). They have also been actively engaging in the COVID-19 combat, especially in the frontline.

Promoting gender equality and women empowerment is a consistent policy and also one of the top priorities of Vietnam in regional and international cooperation frameworks, the Vice President affirmed.

During the summit, the Vietnamese delegation actively took part in nearly 20 plenary and panel discussions on different issues.

International delegates spoke highly of Vietnam’s achievements in gender equality promotion and women empowerment, noting that they are impressed with the dynamism of Vietnamese businesswomen.

Themed “Women Transforming Economies”, the summit attracted more than 500 delegates from 45 countries and territories, including officials, female business leaders, and representatives of women’s organisations.