When the world’s largest development agency speaks, the rest of the NGO/NPO community listens–whether to critique, scrutinize or get new ideas from.

Following its May update on the East Asia and Pacific region, the World Bank has released the results of the mid-year World Bank  Group-Vietnam consultative discussions and made public the newest Vietnam country cooperative strategy for 2012 – 2016. We’ve been soaking up all the information these two reports have to offer. Between the cooperation strategy and consultative discussion, there are over 200 pages of material. Much of it underscores what many us can feel instinctivelly: that after a quarter century of model development, Vietnam’s growth has slowed; that much of Vietnam’s earlier growth came at the expense of the environment and plans for sustainable must be set in motion; and that Vietnam’s human capital, infrastructure and innovation systems must be developed for it to avoid the “middle income trap.” But all is not grim–buttressed by a young workforce and a strong export portfolio (for the time being), Vietnam has plenty of potential to tap into.

So that you can avoid pouring days over the two reports, we’ve perused, combined and summarized highlights from both.

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