Innovative Digital Tools Facilitate Access to Carbon Benefits for Ethnic Minorities in Viet Nam

In Viet Nam during fiscal year 2025, EnABLE financed the development of innovative digital tools designed to expand access to emission reductions program benefits for the country’s most marginalized groups—ethnic minorities. It is a user-centered digital platform, developed with the help of AI, to capture decision-making processes, manage funds, and disclose progress, all with the goal of making community benefit sharing more inclusive, efficient, and transparent.

A key innovation is the integration of ethnic languages into the app, enabling these minority communities to access and use digital transcription and summarization tools. As a result, Katu2Vi and Pako2Vi are the world’s first AI models capable of accurately translating Katu and Pako into Vietnamese, supporting ethnic-minority inclusion in ERP and benefit sharing processes in Viet Nam while also helping to bridge the digital divide.  

The models were developed with the active participation of ethnic-minority group members, including youth and the elderly, whose voices formed the core of the training data. This included 17+ hours of audio recorded in multiple villages using interviews on such topics as agriculture, forestry, and daily life and customs. Multiple training sessions were provided to ensure that members were able to make the most of the app.

For more information on EnABLE’s activities supporting social inclusion in the World Bank’s results-based climate finance initiatives, see the EnABLE Annual Report 2025.

READ THE REPORT HERE