Mr. Nguyen The Phuoc - Permanent Vice Chairman of Yen Bai People's Committee received and worked with the delegation

At the working session, Mr. Nguyen The Phuoc - Permanent Vice Chairman of the Provincial People's Committee informed the delegation about the province's general economic development. With 80% of the people living in rural areas and 60% of them directly working in agriculture, the economy of cooperatives and cooperative groups plays a very important role in ensuring life stability and creating jobs, hunger eradication and poverty reduction for people in rural, remote and isolated areas. In recent years, Yen Bai province has had many mechanisms and policies to convert production from households to combine into cooperative groups and cooperatives. Up to now, the province has over 500 cooperatives and over 4,000 cooperative groups, creating jobs for tens of thousands of local workers.

However, the operation of cooperatives still has many difficulties, small scale, low capacity, management level has not met the requirements. Therefore, in the coming time, Yen Bai province will continue to discuss policies to support the development of the collective economic sector that is appropriate in the current period. He wanted the Vietnam Cooperative Alliance and the ILO to pay attention and create conditions to help Yen Bai province in training, retraining and capacity building for the cooperative managers; expanding the scale of the cooperative; grasp information to ensure the rights and interests of workers in the cooperative; promote the cooperative development fund; attract resources from international organizations ... so that the collective economic sector, the core of the cooperative, step by step innovates its organization and operation to affirm more clearly the role and position of cooperatives in the economy, contribute to ensuring social security and actively contribute to the socio-economic development of the province for Yen Bai to develop rapidly and sustainably in the direction of green, harmony, identity and happiness.

 Mr. Nguyen Ngoc Bao - Chairman of Vietnam Cooperative Alliance and Mr. Chang Hee Lee - ILO Director in Vietnam highly appreciated the role and development speed of cooperatives in the province over the past time. Through visiting and surveying cooperative development models in some localities in the province, the delegation highly appreciated the efforts, enthusiasm and creativity of  the cooperative managers to increase the income of members, as well as their desires for their products to reach large domestic and international markets.

With long-term cooperation, the Vietnam Cooperative Alliance and the ILO will research and support the development of cooperatives, especially in rural areas and Northern provinces; mobilize, connect resources, build cooperative development funds to expand the scale of cooperatives and replicate effective models, contributing to poverty reduction, job creation and income improvement for people, gradually erase the gap between urban and rural areas.