The ASEAN Socio-Cultural Community Blueprint 2025: Opportunities and Challenges to Viet Nam

Among the three pillars of the ASEAN Community (namely the ASEAN Political-Security Community, the ASEAN Economic Community and the ASEAN Socio-Cultural Community), the ASEAN Political-Security Community is the prerequisite for building, forming, and strengthening the ASEAN Community. A region could not reach sustainable development without the minimum conditions of peace, security, stability, equity, democracy and consensus. The ASEAN Economic Community plays a role as the driving force to promote economic cooperation, narrow the development gap, improve the lives and well-being of the people, and increase the growth and prosperity of the entire region.

Ambassador, Dr. Luan Thuy Duong.

Meanwhile, the ASEAN Socio-Cultural Community play the special roles, both as the goals and the basis of building and strengthening the Community, because the utmost goal and the main purpose of the ASEAN Community is to put people at the centre, to ensure that people have all conditions to fully develop both physically and mentally, living in a harmonious, sharing, stable and developing society.

The ASEAN Socio-Cultural Community Blueprint 2025 is aimed at 5 major goals:

First, to engage people and bring practical benefit to the people, through empowering for people and strengthening the institutions that can bring about the engagement of various groups / genders into ASEAN processes.

Second, to better respond to the people's interests in terms of welfare, social protection, gender equality, human rights, poverty reduction, health, employment, education and information.

Third, building the sustainable communities with the sustainable conservation and management of the natural resources and biodiversity, minimizing the impacts of the climate change.

Fourth, to improve the capacity to cope with challenges, through enhancing the capacities of disaster forecasting, handling and management.

Fifth, to create the favorable environment (namely policies, institutions) to encourage people and businesses to adapt, innovate, and be more accountable and build up the business culture in ASEAN.

With such Blueprint 2025, the ASEAN Socio-Cultural Community gives Viet Nam many opportunities to get benefit as well as contribute and play its role.

First, the international cooperation in culture, tourism and sports has been strengthened, contributing to enhancing the promotion of the image of the Vietnamese country, culture and people to the world, creating the "soft power" for the country.

Second, the information technology, especially the mass media, has strongly developed, the activities of the press agencies have also been renewed, actively integrating and learning from the world's media experience, bringing about tremendous developments with multi-dimensional information rich in content. The development in information technology has contributed to improving people's intellectual, helping people to get swift access to new human knowledge, improving labor productivity and quality of life.

Third, Viet Nam is considered as a member that has made great efforts in mingling the realization of the goals of the ASEAN Socio-Cultural Community Blueprint 2025 into national programs and projects and has made significant progress in the fields of culture, society, education, health, environment, science and technology.

Fourth, as the Chair of ASEAN 2020, Viet Nam has proposed many initiatives and priorities in the areas of human resource development, social welfare, with special attention to women and children; strengthening cooperation in response to natural disasters and other regional and global challenges; raising awareness of environmental security, cyber-security ... thereby enhancing Viet Nam's reputation and position in ASEAN as well as on the international arena.

Ambassador Luan Thuy Duong (first, right) with Ambassador of ASEAN member countries in Myanmar.

Viet Nam, however, faces many challenges in the process of building the ASEAN Socio-Cultural Community and playing its own role.

First, Viet Nam is still in the course of transition, trying to perfect the socialist-oriented market economy while the scientific and technical capacity and the human resources have limitations. The economic development is not sustainable, affecting all aspects of social life development.

Second, the human resources for the development of the ASEAN Socio-Cultural Community's content are weak and lack professional and managing skills, especially innovation capacity and economic management skills. The quality of managing staff at all levels can not keep up with the increasingly rich, diversified and complex issues in the ASEAN Socio-Cultural Community, leading to confusion in making policies, constructing the implementation and handling cases of law violations and in social policies.

Besides, Viet Nam still has some limitations such as:

First, the quality of activities has not been fully assessed though Viet Nam has implemented all the ASEAN Socio-Cultural Community contents mentioned in the national master plan on ASEAN Socio-Cultural Community;

Second, the development gap among regions, and ethnic groups are still wide, and the priorities for regions and ethnic groups in the national policy are not totally equitable;

Third, though the ASEAN Community has been well known throughout the region, the awareness of the ASEAN Socio-Cultural Community is not sufficient, especially in terms of the objectives and measures in the ASEAN Socio-Cultural Community Blueprint 2025;

Fourth, the work of inspection and supervision to ensure the effective implementation of the content of building and developing the ASEAN Socio-Cultural Community has not been strengthened;

Fifth, there is still a shortage of legal framework in consolidating the people-centered legal system, ensuring the national legal system in harmony and complying with the ASEAN and international legal standards;

Sixth, the domestic inter-agency consultation as well as the consultation within each ministry have been worked out rather well, but the exchange of information and lessons on the implementation of the national master plan on ASEAN Socio-Cultural Community has not been done regularly.

Against this background, Viet Nam needs to exert more efforts in order to play larger role in the development of the ASEAN Socio-Cultural Community Blueprint 2025.

First, from the national perspective, it is necessary to promote the participation of all social sectors in the process of building the ASEAN Community. This is the mandatory principle for the ASEAN Socio-Cultural Community in particular and the ASEAN Community in general to become the Community of the people, by the people and for the people.

Second, Viet Nam must have a separate mechanism for the Socio-Cultural Community in reporting and explaning in order to ensure that all people have rights and benefit.

Third, Viet Nam should actively complete all necessary legal frameworks so that all citizens can be equal, living and working in the state and society with rule of law, integrating into the international standards and laws.

From a regional perspective, Viet Nam should have the resources and focus on the following areas to strengthen its position.

* The Covid-19 pandemic has shown the need to encourage ASEAN countries to consolidate their heathcare systems, step by step building up the ASEAN healthcare system to have network of links, technical exchanges, providing social and healthcare services to all ASEAN citizens.

*Strengthening and maximizing the role of the food, water, energy backup system and expanding the social security network to cope with possible risks.

* Building an open and adaptive ASEAN society, in which information technology is widely applied; encouraging free access to information and communication technologies in accordance with the national laws.

*Encouraging regional cooperation in the fields of education, training and research and strengthening ASEAN's role in regional and global research networks.

Viet Nam will continue to proactively, actively and responsibly participate in all ASEAN cooperation activities in general as well as social-cultural cooperation in particular to contribute to building a unified, dynamic and prosperous ASEAN Community "for the people, by the people", in which the ASEAN Socio-Cultural Community plays an important role in ensuring a equitable society with the quality of people's life being improved./.

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