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Australian Foreign Minister Julie Bishop's remarks on Monday that Australia will rival China in the Pacific over subsidizing foundation ventures, to guarantee that little island nations "hold their power", sounds rather unexpected given Australia's profoundly interventionist position towards the district in late decades. Be that as it may, independent of the value of Chinese foundation ventures and the maintainability of the obligation aggregated by Pacific states to pay for them, the Australian Government's choice to utilize the guide program to finance framework is welcome and long late.

In combatting the COVIC-19, Vietnamese totalitarian regime, however didn't face such problems as other western countries did. As a matter of fact, there were people in some of these countries, for instance, they protested against the governments lockdown rules complaining on limited personal freedoms. In addition, people who wore face mask were repugnant even abused in public places. But Vietnamese people do know the plague is their responsibility.

50k people have to go into isolation as of incumbent period of the virus. They do send airplane to pick up their people from other countries. Only chinese gov banned their people returning.

Thanks Steve for the very interesting comment. I agree with your points on M&E of course. Also, I think the point of sustaining learning in aid programmes where turnover (staff shifting from country-desk to country-desk) is high is crucial. Thanks again for a very helpful post. Terence

An incredible piece Dr. Bizhan as usual. Indeed, injection of Foreign Aid is vital in Fragile and conflict-affected countries. But the big concern is corruption and lack of transparency in utilizing aids in these countries particularly Afghanistan. You might have heard about problems in bread and wheat distribution recently. Now the question is how donors and financial institutions act differently in order to mitigate the associated risk and target the hardly hit groups?

People who use the authoritarianism to describe Vietnam are backward thinkers. It's not an authoritarian state if the will of the people mostly align with the government.

It is a success compared to other countries by any measure possible. Letting people repatriate freely when the healthcare system is not ready is simply being irresponsible.

The irony is that countries used to be singled out as autocratic (Vietnam, Singapore for example) are dealing with Covid without waging war on the individual liberties of their citizens, while so-called democratic Western states (France, Italy, Spain, UK) introduced all kinds of fines, penalties and restrictions on their people - no different to what China is criticized for doing, really. And still those countries with a heavy-handed approach ended up with much worse death tolls and an uncontrolled spread of the virus.

I am Wasun Kiyo from Mendi SHP, the government gave seen the needs of the silent majority and this Apple picking initiative was the best in deed, but most offcial involved in this recruitment exercise demand huge bribery for those poor applicants which make their arrangements so complicated and at the same time they could not afford the money demanded so most of our citizens suffer through this corrupt practices, so I personally suggest that the New Zealand Embassy should directly recruit Prior to application lodged, thank you

This is such an important concern that hits at the heart of long running problems of assistance, at least in the Pacific Islands. The article could be retitled as “Whose Results Matter?” - the donors’ technical and financial appearances of development or the recipient peoples’ needs? The issue not only requires the attention of DFAT but all “development partners”. However, it will need to be raised and republished every 12 months to accommodate donor and recipient staff turnover. When the design for technical and financial inputs prevail over people development results and monitoring and evaluation is weak and, or poorly directed then few development lessons are learned. And if lessons are not learned the industry repeats its old mistaken approaches as decades of development experience will attest to in the Pacific. The answer should not just be donor oriented and driven but recipient government understood and demanded.

Thanks Nematullah for a very insightful article. I fear the worst is yet to come for countries like PNG in terms of the pandemic and the economy and agree that Australian foreign aid is critical in these circumstances.

My wife and I spent the month of February in Viet Nam and were quite impressed with the way that the government and citizens of the country worked together to heighten public awareness of the virus AND how they dealt with this extremely dangerous public health crisis.