information dissemination at the commune level. Mechanisms to monitor progress on a regular basis will also be needed.

The meed for monitoring of public service and actions. Greater participation by poor households will require that more information on a broad range of issues of importance to poor people is more widely available — to poor people and to civil society organizations which work to support them or represent them. Some measurement of information flows and dissemination could be extremely useful in indicating progress towards greater participation. Citizen feedback should be actively sought on public actions and services. In many countries, mechanisms such as scorecards and rankings by households of the quality of public services have provided a powerful tool in reorienting public services to be more useful and relevant to those who use them. These could be used in Vietnam to provide monitoring information on many of the sectors included in the core VDGs and targets set out in this chapter while also giving poor people more influence in the content and nature of public actions.

# Goal Ten: Eradicate poverty and preserve the culture and diversity of ethnic minorities

Ethic minority developments requires special attention across all sectors. There is a cross-cutting regional dimension to the current social and poverty situation in Vietnam and to the challenges for achieving the VDGs, as we have discussed above. This regional dimension is strongly correlated to the presence of ethnic minorities, as many live in some of the most lagging regions. Over 13 percent or about 10 million people in Vietnam belong to an ethnic minority group. Analysis using various criteria has shown that while progress has been made, reduction in poverty for these minority groups has been much slower than the national average.* Between 1993 and 1998, the poverty rate among ethnic minorities reduced from 86 percent to 75 percent, in contrast to a reduction from 54 percent to 31 percent for the Kinh majority.

The CPRGS clearly stipulates that, to achieve the VDGs, special attention will have to be paid to eradicating poverty among the main ethnic minorities. As a result, all CPRGS targets and progress indicators will be broken down by main ethnic group so as to enable close monitoring of the progress made. The CPRGS also identifies a number of special targets and indicators for the main ethnic minority groups to be embedded in the sectoral targets. Such targets refer to closing the gap between ethnic minorities and the rest of the population for each of the sectors. However, some areas cannot be fully addressed within any one sector and deserve special attention. This has led to the following three additional targets (Box 12).

Box 12. Goal Ten: Eradicate Poverty and Preserve the Culture and Diversity of Ethnic Minorities

## Target 1: Preserve and develop the reading and writing ability of ethnic languages

Target 2: Ensure entitlement of individual and collective land-use rights in ethnic minority and mountainous areas Target 3: Increase the proportion of ethnic minority people in authority bodies at various levels Source: Socialist Republic of Vietnam (2002) Pre-school programs in ethnic languages will be important. Educational achievements of ethnic minorities in the past ten years have lagged behind national ones (see for example the analysis by Baulch ® It should be noted that a substantial diversity in development progress exists among these ethnic groups. The Central Highland minorities lag behind most substantially with a level of expenditure that has remained stagnant since 1993. Of its inhabitants, 91 percent live below the poverty line. Of the northern upland minorities, about 73 percent are poor. Separate targets may be warranted for several groups.

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