Vietnam and Belgium’s Wallonie-Bruxelles region signed cooperation minutes for the 2019-2021 period in Brussels on November 21, covering a total of 25 projects, as part of the 10th meeting of the Vietnam – Wallonie-Bruxelles Joint Committee.

Vietnamese Deputy Minister of Planning and Investment Vu Dai Thang (right) and General Director of Wallonie-Bruxelles International (WBI) Pascale Delcomminette at the signing ceremony. (Photo: VNA)

Accordingly, the two sides will promote collaboration in industrial development, agriculture, transport, the environment, the fourth Industrial Revolution, healthcare, education, tourism, culture and Francophone issues.

Among the 25 projects there are 13 new ones, including a project on enhancing professional and French language skills for journalists of the Vietnam News Agency.

The 10^th meeting of the Vietnam – Wallonie-Bruxelles Joint Committee took place on November 20-21 under the chair of Vietnamese Deputy Minister of Planning and Investment Vu Dai Thang and General Director of Wallonie-Bruxelles International (WBI) Pascale Delcomminette.

At the meeting, Pascale Delcomminette highlighted the close cooperation between Vietnam and Wallonie-Bruxelles over the past 25 years with many useful projects.

Wallonie-Bruxelles will coordinate with the Wallonie Export-Investment Agency (AWEX) in Vietnam and competent agencies to seek cooperation opportunities and to serve the implementation of joint projects.

For his part, Thang applauded the support of the Belgian Government and people in general and the Wallonie-Bruzelles region in particular, for Vietnam’s development.

The freshly-inked projects will contribute to materializing commitments made by Governments of the two countries in the spirit of the Vietnam-Belgium joint statement issued during the official visit to Belgium by Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc last October, he said.

During the two-day meeting, the two sides reviewed outcomes of cooperation between Vietnam and Wallonie-Bruxelles in the 2016-2018 period, and discussed the building of action plans and cooperation programmes in the next three years.

They said projects deployed over the past three years have brought about benefits to both sides, and agreed to pay more attention to applied research towards a cooperation programme on industrial and economic development, in the context of the Vietnamese Government striving to turn the country into a startup nation./.

VNF/VNA