Regional Forum on Policies on Aging in Myanmar

On 20-21 July 2017 in Nay Pyi Taw, Myanmar, Ministry of Social Welfare, Resettlement along with United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) and HelpAge International (HAI) organized a Regional Forum on Policies on Aging. The main aims of this Forum were to share country experiences in socio-economic development strategies and policies along with aging populations as well as discuss the ‘bottle-neck’ of policy implementations. The Forum welcomed the participation of more than 40 experts and policy makers from regional countries as well as about 80 policy makers and researchers from Myanmar.
 

At the Forum, Associate Prof. Giang Thanh Long made one presentation about Vietnam’s experiences and joined the concluding panel discussion. In his presentation, Assoc. Prof. Long emphasized that countries needed to consider aging as a core issue in development in the coming decades. In order to reach so-called ‘successful aging’, he further discussed how countries should prepare for an aging population and provided some examples from Vietnam. It was indicated that strategies and policies for aging and older people were available, but the main concern was about their implementations. Considering older people were as ‘stock’ while aging population was as ‘flow’, Assoc. Prof. Long implied that policies on aging and those for older people were not always the same, so that each country should be adaptive.

In the concluding panel discussion, Assoc. Prof. Long discussed intensively about evidence-based research in order to make policies at right time with right manners. A number of issues related to data collections, analyses, reports, etc. were discussed with his experiences working on Vietnam’s aging issues.