Mark Ashwill is an American educator, PhD and former director of the International Institute for Education (IIE) until he and his wife Hang in 2009 created Capstone Vietnam, an educational consulting service based in Hanoi.  Mark spoke at a recent Vietnam-US Higher Education Forum in Hanoi, and was surprised to find that almost no one in the audience of 150 attendees knew that a much heralded scholarship program, the Vietnam Education Foundation (VEF) — assumed to be sponsored by the U.S. government — is actually funded by the Vietnamese government as a debt swap arrangement.  The Vietnamese government agreed, as part of the normalization process 20 years ago, to pay back $146 million in agricultural and other loans that the U.S. had provided to the defeated Saigon government.  With debt and the Greek crisis on everyone’s mind, details of the Vietnamese debt payback to the U.S. in the 2010 article below by Mark Ashwill may surprise many Americans as well as Vietnamese.

http://markashwill.com/2010/11/25/vef-from-vietnam-with-money/

11-29-2010

VEF: From Vietnam With Money ($)

In April 1997, during a three-day visit to Vietnam, then Secretary of the Treasury Robert Rubin announced that the Vietnamese government had agreed to repay the $146 million wartime debt of the former South Vietnam.  Four years earlier, Vietnam agreed in principle to assume the debt from its former enemy as part of a larger agreement that cleared the way for renewed international borrowing by Hanoi, previously blocked by Washington.  Tiếp tục đọc “Where does Vietnam Education Foundation get its funding ?” →