On the afternoon of June 8, 2021, the General Statistics Office in collaboration with the Italian Statistical Office held the 3rd meeting of the Project Management Board "Improving the national statistical system of Vietnam". ” funded by the Government of Italy online. Ms. Nguyen Thi Huong - General Director of General Statistics Office delivered the opening speech.

Attending the meeting were representatives of AICS development organization and focal points of project components from two statistical agencies. Ms. Simonetta, representing AICS Rome, and her colleagues reported on AICS's activities in the region and an overview of the project's progress. Component focal points representing the General Statistics Office presented a report summarizing the implementation of the Components over the past time.

During the period from October 23, 2020 to April 22, 2021, due to the complicated development of the Covid-19 epidemic worldwide, the project's activities were implemented in the form of online instead of experts. to direct support at the General Statistics Office as before. Activities implemented focus on 3 components on Institutional Capacity Building, Energy and Information Dissemination. Some objective reasons lead to the inability to conduct activities in the online form in other components such as participants involving many ministries and branches in the component on Environment and climate change or concerns about the actual effectiveness of support activities in the Information Technology component.

From the beginning of the project until now, the activities have been implemented well thanks to the active participation of both the Italian Statistical Office and the General Statistics Office, the project progress about 71%. However, there are still some issues that slow down the progress or affect the efficiency of activities such as time zone difference, language problems and some problems arising when implementing projects online...

After the discussion, the General Statistics Office and ISTAT together came up with a number of solutions to overcome existing problems. In addition, the project implementation period is proposed to be extended to October 22, 2022 to ensure enough time to carry out the remaining activities and conduct 2 survey trips.