Chairman of the city People’s Committee Huỳnh Đức Thơ and UNDP Resident Representative Caitlin Wiesen yesterday signed a Memorandum of Understanding on Monday. — Photo courtesy of UNDP

ĐÀ NẴNG — The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and central Đà Nẵng City will build a lab together to accelerate the socio-economic development and achievement of Sustainable Development Goals of the city.

Chairman of the city People’s Committee Huỳnh Đức Thơ and UNDP Resident Representative Caitlin Wiesen yesterday signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to facilitate joint learning, exploration and experimentation of innovative solutions.

“The signing of MoU today is an important milestone in the co-operation between UNDP and Đà Nẵng,” said UNDP Resident Representative Caitlin Wiesen at the signing ceremony.

“UNDP will mobilise its network and resources to support Đà Nẵng achieve its ambitions of becoming a smart, green city by 2045, drawing on UNDP‘s Accelerator Labs - a network of 60 labs in 78 countries designed to reimagine development for the 21st century.”

Building on the past and on-going experience, co-operation between Đà Nẵng and UNDP will focus on the areas of environment (such as plastics waste); application of innovative e-solutions for advancing public administrative services (such as faster learning and acting on citizens’ feedbacks and concerns, and application of AI empowered chatbots in providing public administration service).

In the later stages, co-operation will expand to other areas of development and social innovations that the parties will define as necessary and feasible.

Regarding circular economy/waste management focal area of the MoU, UNDP is working closely with Đà Nẵng partners to design waste sorting projects in Khuê Trung Ward, Cẩm Lệ District.

This experiment is expected to offer some useful learning to the wider waste sorting plans in the city.

UNDP will also bring a leading team on systemic design from the Alberta CoLab in Canada, to work with Đà Nẵng’s Department of Natural Resources and Environment on a systemic assessment of waste management to identify leverage points for near, medium and long-term future.

The co-operation between UNDP and Đà Nẵng City started in 2010, when the city partnered with UNDP and the Ministry of Home Affairs on public administration reform to strengthen resource management, salary reform and quality of public administrative service delivery via one-stop-shops.

Recently UNDP supported Đà Nẵng in the design and implementation of the Chatbot initiative to provide real time public service information to the citizens. The Chatbot has been applied in different sectors including land, transport, tourism, feedback on flooding and hope to expand to other areas. —VNS