Vietnam is likely to reach the target of 100 percent of rural households to get access to electricity for rural households.

World Bank Country Director for Vietnam Victoria Kwakwa made the statement at a seminar to assess the impact of Vietnam’s rural electrification (RE) and the announcement of the result of a survey on the benefit of RE in Hanoi on Dec. 9.

All of the nation’s districts have connected to the national grid and had on-the-spot electricity and 97.78 percent of communes and 95.4 percent of rural families now have electricity, Kwakwa said.

She spoke highly of the joint efforts of the Vietnamese Government, enterprises and people and various resources for rural development, hunger eradication and poverty reduction in the field.

Together with the impact of the education universalisation programme, RE has helped rural people improve their health and income through increasing their families’ production capacity, she added.

However, she said, authorities need to make thorough calculations and give priority to use resources in the context of limited finance and technology to help the remaining five percent of rural families access electricity.

The result of the survey that was conducted in seven provinces of Vietnam in 2002, 2005 and 2008 within the framework of the RE project is an important foundation for WB to consider the decision to provide continued assistance and coordinate with the Vietnamese Government to carry out more power projects, said the seminar.

According to Deputy Minister of Industry and Trade Hoang Quoc Vuong, the government is striving to have 100 percent electricity access for rural households by 2020 as planned.

The comprehensive assessment of the impact of rural electrification and the potential for on-the-spot distribution will help the Government, enterprises and people select the most effective investment in network power projects or use on-the-spot power sources./.