Strengthening Public Integrity for Effective Anti-corruption

The organising board for the programme received 160 projects from social institutions, non-government organisations (NGOs), universities, private companies and local anti-corruption agencies. Projects focus on preventing corruption in many sectors, including health, education, public administration, personnel recruitment, minority ethnics, disabilities, information and communication technology, information transparency, IT solutions, automation and art forms. These draw a vivid picture of community’s possibility ability social works.

 

A broad participation of all social strata in this competition proves that public awareness on this issue has been raised, and the people are paying more attention to transparency, accountability and ethics in public administration.

 

The jury selected 34 most creative, most feasible, most sustainable and most effective anti-corruption projects. These are most excellent projects out of 60 finalists. Each winning project was given a maximum of VND290 million and this money will be used for deployment of its ideas. The total award value was VND9.2 billion this year.

 

VACI 2011 programme is designed from the success of VACI 2009 with the same theme. VACI will be held by the Government Inspectorate and the World Bank (WB) in every two years and the next will fall in 2013.

Difficulties ahead

 

Mr Tran Duc Luong, Deputy General Director of the Government Inspectorate, Vietnam has made positive progress in anti-corruption. In spite of much efforts and determinations, corruption in Vietnam remains very complicated. This is the major concern of the society.

 

International experience shows efforts of State governing bodies are not enough to root out corruption but it requires promoting roles, responsibilities, and active involvement and support of the entire society. Thus, Vietnam has adopted many guidelines and policies to encourage and convince people, businesses and social organisations to prevent and combat corruption.

 

Mr Luong said VACI 2011 aimed to raise public awareness of anti-corruption law and bring into play the role and responsibility of the people, agencies, organisations, units and public employees in combating corruption. The programme was expected to enhance cooperative relations between Vietnam and the international community in anti-corruption activities and aimed to reflect Vietnam’s responsibility as a member of the United Nations Convention against Corruption.

 

He noted that all projects pinpointed the enhancement of public supervision. At present, the public oversight is ineffective because the people are perhaps are unaware of advantage, right, responsibility and duty. By popularising laws in general and anti-corruption laws in particular, the supervision of the community will be encouraged and grassroots democracy will be promoted. “It is necessary to strengthen public integrity and law enforcement for more effective anti-corruption”, said Mr Luong.