[15 May 2016] — Economica Vietnam has been entrusted by Vietnam Poultry Association (VIPA) and An Giang Business Association (ABA) in the efforts of strengthening the capacity of the two associations and the services which they provide to members. This follows the success of the study entitled “Journey Toward Linkage – Best Practices of Vietnamese Associations and Self-assessment Tools” on the best practices of business associations with support from  the Asia Foundation (TAF) in 2014-2015.

 

Support to the two associations are follow-up supports to Vietnamese Business Association by The Asia Foundation with the overall objective of providing assistance to some associations for applying the best practices in improving their performance.  

In the first project, Economica Vietnam is coordinating with Vietnam Poultry Association (VIPA)  in implementing the organization capacity assessment and revising the institutional development strategy in order to providing better service to association’s member businesses and for a sustainable development of  the association. In implementing the project, Economica has been applying different techniques including strategic analysis, value chain analysis, competitive force analysis and SWOT analysis to define the position and the development direction of VIPA. This is especially to ensure that the services provided by VIPA meet its members’ needs and for a more secured financial resource of the association. Questionnaire has been composed to help the association in collecting feedback from its members concerning their needs toward the services supplied by VIPA and the recommendations  of the members as  the common owners toward the existing development strategy of VIPA. Beside, the self-assessment tool developed by the previous study has been tailor-made to fit with the specific capacity assessment of VIPA and used for strategic analysis.  

Basing on the information collected using the mentioned research methods Economica and VIPA are working to develop a new version of the association development strategy which will be focused on the development  of institutional capacity and the capacity in providing  services for a sustainable development of both of the member businesses and  VIPA itself. Beside, Economica is assisting  VIPA to design and publish its website in order to provide more effective service to the members, specially in knowledge sharing and policy advocacy; The bulletin “Poultry in Vietnam” issued quarterly by VIPA will be consulted for better functioning; Economica will also assist the association in restructuring the Centre of Poultry Services and Consultancy under VIPA to improve the performance of the center for better performance in providing services and sustain the financial capacity of the association.

The consultancy to An Giang Business Association (ABA) is the second project of Economica under the assistance scheme of The Asia Foundation. In order to implement this project Economica take advantages of the previous research on trading of agro-product in Mekong delta under the impacts of free-trade-agreements (FTA) implemented in cooperation with CIEM and Action AID in 2015. Economica also uses its property which is the deep knowledge of business environment of An Giang got from several field trips at the province. The experience is used by Economica to help ABA to analyze the opportunity and obstacles of integration under the impact of these new generation FTAs.  Economica will work with ABA to define how local policy react to the impacts of the FTAs to assist the sustainable development of the member businesses. The analysis is done with two important sectors of An Giang including Aquatic Production and Other Agro-production. Together we will define the specific policies of the province which needs amending or developing to cope with the impacts of the FTAs.

In order to do so, we will develop tools and program for advocacy and providing technical assistance in implementing the advocacy activities for the policies proposed by ABA. The tools will be consolidate in to a Manual of Advocacy to be used by ABA for a longer time. Lessons learnt from the project and activities will be reviewed by Economica in a “Case Study Report” for the purpose of sharing and replication.

Business associations is becoming very effective resources of services for business members and a very effective channel for connecting business with government and to each other. By supporting the business associations Economica is contributing to the improvement of the business environment and the sustainable development of the enterprises.