STEP project conducted 6 training courses in Products & Services and 7 in Risk Management between August and December 2019. 370 managers and employees (168 women and 204 men) from 75 pilot People’s Credit Funds in three regions of Vietnam participated in this training series.

The content of the Risk Management training session was a combination of theoretical and practical concepts of internal audit for PCFs. The conceptual difference between “internal audit” and “internal control” was also briefly discussed. Roughly 80% of the training duration was allocated to guide the trainees through business cases on how to use properly the internal audit toolkit.

The objectives of the Products & Services training included understanding of cash-flow based lending methodology, two new loan products and application of different tools developed by DID experts, for example marketing, loan appraisal tool and agriculture guideline that can support PCFs’ loan officers to conduct their activities.

The environmental and social assessment and gender issues in financial sector have also been integrated into the training content.

The PCF trainings were developed based on participatory training method to maximize interactions between trainers and participants and reach the course objectives. All along the training, the trainees were provided with laptops to work on the toolkits in a “live environment”.

Overall, STEP training courses received very good feedbacks from PCF participants – 98% of the participants answered “Strongly Agree” or “Agree” to the statement “Overall, I am satisfied with the training”. After the pilot training for some PCFs and the training of trainers for CoopBank staff, the deployment training was another important step to realize the capacity building strategy of STEP project.