Hanoi (VNA) – ❀The Government on November 22 issued Decision No. 1679/QD-TTg approving the Vietnam Population Strategy by 2030.

The strategy shifts the centre of the national population policy from family planning to comprehensive objectives, covering population scale, structure, distribution and quality, and integrates them into socio-economic, social, national defence and security factors.

Maintaining replacement fertility

The strategy sets the targets of maintaining the replacement fertility, narrowing fertility rate gaps between regions and groups, and preserving and developing populations of ethnic minority groups that have less than 10,000 people each. Under the strategy, Vietnam aims to maintain the population age structure at an appropriate level, with 22 percent of children under 15 and 11 percent of those over 65. The independents are set to account for 49 percent of the total population. Other objectives include adapting to population aging and stepping up health care for the elderly. About 70 percent of the elderly will directly participate in production and business and all of them will have health insurance cards. To that end, Vietnam will enhance the leadership of all-level Party Committees and authorities, renew communication methods, perfect relevant mechanisms, policies and laws and improve the quality of population-related services. Besides, the country will push ahead with scientific study, perfect the population data and information system, ensure resources for the population work and enhance international cooperation.

Ensuring resources for population work

The decision highlighted increasing investment sourced from the State budget at both central and local levels and stepping up the diversification of investment resources from the community, the business circle and the private sector. The State budget must ensure necessary needs to serve the comprehensive implementation of the population work and realise relevant policies. Under the decision, concerned agencies will add population programmes and projects to public investment programmes and plans, publicly allocate the funding, and closely manage and improve the efficiency in the use of State budget in this regard. The population work also needs non-State funding and policies to encourage organisations, businesses and individuals at home and abroad to invest in building facilities producing and supplying equipment and services. The decision also mentioned developing the insurance market, including State and commercial insurance, with diverse insurance packages in order to ensure equality for typical ethnic groups in accessing public welfare. It also suggested forming a fund for the elderly so that all people receive care when they get older. Vietnam’s population is in the process of rapid aging, with people aged 65 and above estimated to account for 13 percent of the total number by 2020, according to a report.

Accordingly, Vietnam now has about 11.3 million elderly people, including about 350,000 aged 90 upwards, and 1.8 million aged 80 and above. Vietnamese people have an average longevity of 74 years and up to 70 percent of its elderly people live in rural areas.

🌸 The report said 96 percent of the elderly people have public health insurance cards. Nearly 100 central- and provincial-level hospitals have geriatric departments accommodating over 8,000 elderly-prioritised beds.     

According to the World Health Organizationꦜ in Vietnam, each old person in Vietnam deals with three types of diseases. It shows while the people’s life expectancy is longer, the number of their quality living years is shorter.”

There are three challenges in the population work, including expanding fertility levels between areas and regions, gender imbalance at birth, and the adaptation to aging population.  The three challenges have been recognized long ago but solutions to them remain absent, so they are still pressing issues that need to be addressed./.