The northern province of Bac Giang is striving to develop its information technology infrastructure for digital transformation and smart urban areas. According to the Vice-Chairman of the provincial People’s Committee Mai Son, Bac Giang targets its digital infrastructure to be able to provide an average of 14 GB of data each month per broadband subscriber by 2025, with the figure to increase to 27 GB by 2030.
It also envisages that 100 local people will be connected to 75-100 IoT devices by 2025 and 150-200 by 2030. The city authorities are also considering constructing an information technology industrial park. Son said that building and upgrading local fibre-optic lines to serve the development of broadband services and smart urban areas is the top priority. The province intends to expand its broadband infrastructure to all villages while having more than 80% of households connected to cable Internet by 2025.
It is estimated that half of the local population will have e-payment accounts within the next four years and all residential areas will have 5G coverage. By 2025, the locality will prioritise digitalisation in key sectors such as education, healthcare, transportation, agriculture, and the environment. Ultimately, it aims to transform Bac Giang city into a smart and modern urban area.
According to the Secretary of the provincial Party Committee, Duong Van Thai, as digitalisation is an inexorable trend, the local Party Committee is working to issue a resolution on digital transformation this month.
Bac Giang province is home to 1,422 base transceiver stations (BTS), with 3G and 4G services covering the entire province. There are more than 1.77 million mobile phone subscriptions and over 1.25 million internet subscribers. The total telecommunications revenue in 2020 topped VND 1.9 trillion (US$82.17 million). There are 658 IT and telecommunications enterprises in the province that earned over VND153 trillion (about US$6.6 billion) in revenue last year.
Last week, the province announced its goal to raise its quality to skilled workers. It aims to increase the rate of skilled workers to 80% and the rate of those with training certificates to 27% by 2025. During the 2021-2025 period, vocational training establishments in the province will provide training to 147,500 workers. The rate of university graduates gaining employment after they complete their studies is to reach more than 90%.
To meet these goals, Bac Giang is focusing on planning vocational training establishments in an open and flexible manner, ensuring the scale and structure of professions being offered. The province will also continue to review and arrange public colleges and schools in a streamlined way, focusing on medicine, pharmaceuticals, and health care, while introducing several vocational training support policies.
It will also upgrade infrastructure and training equipment at vocational training establishments, so they are more appropriate for Industry 4.0. By the end of last year, the province was home to 44 vocational training establishments that offered training to nearly 36,000 people each year in a total of 109 professions.
As part of a project to improve the quality of vocational training for rural workers under the National Target Programme on New Rural Development for the 2016-2020 period, Bac Giang allocated over VND 43.8 billion (about US$1.8 million) in support of training 15,386 rural workers. As of last year, the rate of skilled workers in the province stood at 70%, an increase of 19.5% from 2015.
