The Country Course on MDGs and Use of Administrative Data Systems for Statistical Purposes was conducted by SIAP through a collaborative partnership of financial support of ADB and administrative support provided by the GSO, Government of Vietnam. A total of 26 officials from NSO and the line ministries including Health, Education, Lbaour and Social welfare and vital registration office participated and completed the course.
The course was designed in consultation with ADB and directed by SIAP. The course was conducted by its faculty member Gamini de Silva, who prepared the training material and delivered the lectures. One of the important activities of ADB Project RETA6356; ’Improving Administrative Data Sources for Monitoring of the MDG Indicators’ is to conduct country training workshop in each of the Project countries on MDGs and Use of Administrative Data Systems for Statistical Purposes.  SIAP was able to take part in the exercise since it matched with the objectives of SIAP.

The training course was designed principally for statisticians involved in the compilation of indicators for monitoring MDGs, particularly those related to education, health and vital statistics. Course topics include: Introduction to Millennium Development Goals (MDG), Targets and Indicators; Administrative Data Systems and issues relating to their quality in collection, processing and data management (coverage, errors, biases, quality control, manual data scrutiny, computerized data editing and data processing); Use of standard definitions and Classifications relating to MDG indicators; MDG indicators compilation and Hands on exercises using country administrative data; MDG Reporting by countries; Use of Administrative Data Systems on Education, Health and Vital Registration for policy making; Construction of indicators including composite indicators; and Group Work on strategies for improving administrative data (Education, Health and Vital Registration). This course also covered Dev Info (user module) for disseminating MDG indicators. Two sessions on use of Dev Info were taken by the local expert from GSO and two lectures on use of administrative data were taken by ADB designated National Consultant in Mongolia. The GSO provided a coordinator, Mr. Nguyen Tuan, Director, International Section for the course and made available all the necessary infrastructure facilities and services of staff of  NSO for the smooth conduct of the course at the Hotel La Than premises in Hanoi.
In addition to the subject matter discussions and class exercises, participants also undertook group work on handling data quality issues relating to subject areas of Health, Education and Vital registration sectors. Healthy discussions followed by presentations of findings were made initiating important dialogue to bridge much needed communication gap between the GSO and the line ministries concerned.  Individual level evaluation of the course revealed that the course had been very useful for the majority of the participants in obtaining the basic understanding of the concepts, methods relating to MDG indicators and data issue involved therein and possible means of handling some of those to improve the data quality. 
 
For the benefit of the participants who were not conversant in English language, services of a translator was provided for the course.
The course was inaugurated by Mr. Ngyen Van Lieu, Deputy Director General of GSO, Government of Vietnam on behalf of the Director General, GSO and  Mr. Nguyen Tuan. Mr. Kaushal Joshi, Statistician, ADB was available as a resource person through out the conduct of the course and assisted in the workshops and group work.