Deputy Prime Minister and Education and Training Minister Nguyen Thien Nhan stressed the need to boost university cooperation with Japan while delivering an opening speech at a conference of Vietnamese-Japanese university rectors in Hanoi on Sept. 17.

The two-day conference is attended by university directors and representatives from relevant ministries and agencies of Vietnam and 53 university directors from Japan .

Deputy PM Nhan said that in the current integration process, developing high-quality human resources is the leading priority and national policy of Vietnam . The Vietnamese education sector is exerting efforts to find measures to comprehensively reform university education, improve the quality of teaching and scientific research, and combine training with the demands of society to make a breakthrough in improving the quality of human resource training to serve the national industrialisation and modernisation process.

He stated that learning and sharing experiences with advanced universities in the region and the world is important and necessary.

Nhan also said that the conference was an opportunity for education administrators, policy makers and university rectors in Japan and Vietnam to exchange experiences in their fields and work out measures to boost cooperation between their universities in future.

A preventative of the Education and Training Ministry introduced participants to a project to build the International University in the central city of Da Nang into a university for research, with Japan as a strategic partner. Vietnam will enrol its best students to the university.

The university will be built with the aim of bringing Vietnam to the top 200 universities in the world by 2030.

Japan is one of biggest donors of official development assistance (ODA) to Vietnam . The Japanese government has so far helped build 256 primary schools in 17 provinces in flood-prone areas and four mountainous northern provinces .

The country also helped improve the capacity of education and training and scientific research for a number of universities in Vietnam and grants scholarships to Vietnamese students every year.

Moreover, a series of projects at the primary and university levels and on human resource development have been carried out with non-refundable aid from the Japanese government.

At present, about 2,800 Vietnamese students are studying in Japan .

In march 2008, education ministries of the two countries signed a memorandum of understanding on Japan helping train 1,000 Ph.D.s at universities in Japan from 2008-2010. In addition, many bilateral cooperation projects between universities of the two countries obtained good results./.