The Japanese Government will provide grants worth 362 million JPY (over US$4 million) for Vietnam to train 28 graduates for master degrees in Japan in 2010.

To this effect, Vietnamese Minister of Education and Training Pham Vu Luan and Japanese Ambassador Mitsuo Sakaba on July 12 signed an exchange note on Japan’s human resource development project for Vietnam in 2010.

Beneficaries are those majoring in law, public policies, business administration, economics, agriculture, information technology, environmental policies and international relations.

This is the 11^th year Japan has granted post-graduate scholarships to Vietnam. A total of 276 Vietnamese graduates benefited from this project from 2000 to 2009 which cost 3.8 billion JPY.

Speaking at the signing ceremony, Minister Luan highly valued the Japanese government’s education assistance programmes for Vietnam, including projects to build primary schools in flood-hit areas and train 1,000 PhDs.

The two sides pledged to accelerate their future cooperative programmes such as building the Vietnam-Japan University and developing bilateral ties between Vietnamese and Japanese universities.