In collaboration with the Foreign Trade University’s Innovation and Incubation Space (FIIS), the APEC-Canada Growing Business Partnership (ACGBP) is hosting a series of workshops aimed at improving inclusive and sustainable growth for MSMEs in Viet Nam.
The series will launch on September 23, 2025, with an event organized in collaboration with the Agency for Private Enterprise and Cooperatives Development (APED), under the Viet Nam Ministry of Finance, and the Pioneering Women Entrepreneurs Network (WeLead). The Pioneering Business Forum 2025, with the theme Inclusive Business – A Solution for Sustainable Competition in the New Era, will take place at the Viet Nam Centre for Women and Development in Hanoi. This initial workshop will highlight the potential of innovative public-private partnerships to promote inclusive business, with a strong emphasis on women’s leadership.
This workshop series comes at a timely moment for Viet Nam. With the ongoing revisions to the Law on Support for Small- and Medium-sized Enterprises, there is a demand for knowledge and expertise on MSME issues among policymakers. The ACGBP project aims to contribute to filling that gap through activities that promote policy actors’ knowledge of gender-responsive and inclusive MSME growth. Together with two policy briefs – which are currently under development –, the workshop series aims to improve capacity among policy actors to implement MSME policies and programming that have gender equality, social inclusion and sustainability as core principles.
The workshops, which are funded by the Government of Canada, are also meaningful to Canada-Viet Nam relations at a time when both economies seek to diversify trade relations and take advantage of untapped opportunities within existing trade agreements. By encouraging the development of a supportive MSME policy system, the ACGBP project is helping create the conditions for enhanced trade capacity for women-led MSMEs in the supply chain. Building upon insights from the ACGBP team’s mission to Viet Nam in July 2025, the workshop series will provide an opportunity to continue to deepen Canada-Viet Nam relations and promote further engagement between the two economies.
