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Good practice Imported

UNDP–IPS review of all 63 Vietnamese provincial e-service portals' accessibility

Vietnam · Hanoi · See the Vietnam profile · See the Hanoi profile

Evidence: Observational / pre–post Top 24% 92/100 · Ask Evidence Copilot about this practice

IPS and UNDP Viet Nam's first independent review of all 63 provincial e-service portals found none met all six basic web-accessibility criteria for visually impaired users, and 62 of 63 lacked voice search — a diagnostic now feeding public-sector staff training.

0 of 63 portals
Provincial e-service portals meeting all 6 basic accessibility criteria (2023)
62 of 63 portals
Portals lacking a voice-search function (2023)
36 of 63 portals
Portals with no on-page search tool (2023)
25 of 63 portals
Portals whose search failed on a misspelled keyword (2023)
1 % (barely over)
Citizens who had used e-portals to process an administrative procedure (2022 PAPI survey)
UNDP–IPS review of all 63 Vietnamese provincial e-service portals' accessibility

Details

Maturity
Established
Promoter
Institute for Policy Studies and Media Development (IPS) with UNDP Viet Nam
Period
October 2022 – July 2023
Keywords
public sector, e-government, disability & ethnic-minority inclusion

Context

Viet Nam's 63 provincial e-service portals (PESPs) are the online gateways citizens use for administrative procedures in every province, but the 2022 national PAPI governance survey found barely over 1% of citizens had used e-portals to process an administrative procedure. In 2023, Viet Nam's Institute for Policy Studies and Media Development (IPS) and the UNDP Viet Nam office, supported by Australia's Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, ran the first independent review of the accessibility and user-friendliness of all 63 portals.

Activities

Portals were tested by both general users and users representing ethnic-minority and disability communities against six basic web-accessibility criteria for people with visual impairments.

Results

None of the 63 portals met all six criteria, and 62 of the 63 offered no voice-search function; 36 portals had no on-page search tool at all, and the search tools on 25 portals failed when users typed a misspelled keyword — a common barrier for ethnic-minority users writing in a non-native script.

Conclusions

IPS and UNDP said the findings were being used to inform training for the public-sector staff who manage the portals, and UNDP has since published a 2024 follow-up review of the same 63 portals, indicating the diagnostic has become a recurring instrument rather than a one-off study.

Implementation
Indicative cost
Low (< €50k) — A donor-supported (Australia DFAT) diagnostic review conducted by a local think tank (IPS) and UNDP using field testers, rather than an infrastructure build.
Time to results
Short (< 1 year) — Fieldwork ran October 2022–July 2023, roughly nine months, with a follow-up review published in 2024.
Staffing & skills
Researchers from the Institute for Policy Studies and Media Development (IPS), UNDP Viet Nam technical staff, Testers representing general users, ethnic-minority communities and people with disabilities

Conditions for success

  • Donor funding from Australia's Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade via the Citizen-Powered Innovation Initiative
  • Testing methodology that includes users with lived experience of disability and ethnic-minority language barriers, not just technical compliance checks
  • Findings fed directly into training for the public-sector staff who manage the portals

Where it fits

Governance type
national government + international donor-backed diagnostic
Scale
national (63 of 63 provinces)
Income level
lower-middle-income

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