After attending the 57th Annual Meeting of the Asian Development Bank (ADB), Deputy Governor Dao Minh Tu of the State Bank of Vietnam (SBV) had a meeting with senior leaders of the French Development Agency (AFD) at the AFD’s headquarters.
Deputy Governor Dao Minh Tu meets French Development Agency (AFD)
At the meeting, the SBV Deputy Governor shared about Vietnam’s macroeconomic situation. In the context that both the world and the domestic economies have been facing many challenges, the SBV has managed the monetary policy in a proactive and flexible manner to maintain the stability of the banking system and the financial market. The SBV’s monetary policy management has brought positive support to the recovery and development process of the Vietnamese economy; contributing to controlling the inflation and maintaining the stability of the macroeconomy; the foreign exchange market has maintained basically stable; the Vietnamese Dong has been more stable as compared to the currencies of many other countries in the region and the world; the lending interest rates have been adjusted to low levels, similar to those before the COVID-19; and the credit resources have been ensured to be supplied to the economy.
The AFD’s senior leaders informed the SBV delegation about their cooperation priorities in the coming time, focusing on green finance and energy transition. Currently, the AFD Group comprises of the French Development Agency (Agence Française de Développement - AFD), which specializes in financing the public sector and non-governmental organizations, as well as researches and education programs on sustainable development; Proparco, an affiliated company specialized in financing the private sector; and the French International Technical Cooperation Agency (Expertise France).
The SBV Deputy Governor shared that the AFD's priorities and fields of operations are aligned with the goals and priorities set out in Vietnam’s Socio-Economic Development Strategy as well as in the Action Plan of Vietnam’s banking system.
Regarding the international commitments and the cooperation with the AFD in the fields of climate change response and green growth, at the 26th Conference of Parties (COP26) of the UNFCCC, Vietnam made a commitment to develop and implement measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, achieve the goal of “net zero" by 2050, and Vietnam was also one of the three countries in the world signing the Just Energy Transition Partnership (JETP) agreement in 2022. Vietnam hopes that it can access financial resources and new technologies to achieve its commitments made at COP26.
The SBV Deputy Governor made high appreciation for the participation of the AFD and other international partners in mobilizing the needed resources for Vietnam, estimated at about 500 million Euros in forms of preferential loans for the businesses and the banks to provide capital for projects that meet the requirements and criteria in JETP. Regarding the "greening" of the banking sector, the SBV has gradually improved the legal frameworks, the credit and banking policies to be aligned with the green growth objectives.
An overview of the meeting
The SBV Deputy Governor also acknowledged the AFD's support for Vietnam's banking sector over the past time, especially through the technical assistance project titled “Improving the legal framework and strengthening the supervision and management capacity for the microfinance sector in Vietnam", which had been implemented in the 2012-2017 period. In addition, the AFD has also conducted a lot of practical cooperation activities with several big banks in Vietnam, including the VCB, the BIDV, etc. Following the successes of the previous project, the SBV would like to receive the AFD’s continued support for the SBV in particular and the banking sector in general in the forms of financial resources, policy advice, support for capacity development, especially in the areas that the AFD has strengths in, such as: green transformation and digital transformation.
HY