Building Smarter Cities: How Digital Tools Are Transforming Public Services in Viet Nam

Viet Nam's cities face mounting development pressures-climate risks, rapid urbanization, and rising citizen expectations-alongside a persistent governance gap: paper files, inconsistent data, and siloed workflows that slow permits, deter investment, and limit job creation.

The Disruptive Technologies for Public Asset Governance (DT4PAG) project set out to close that gap. Launched in 2023 with a US$3 million grant from Switzerland's State Secretariat for Economic Affairs (SECO) and implemented by the World Bank, DT4PAG partnered with three cities: Ho Chi Minh City, Da Nang, and Hue to co-design digital solutions around real operational needs-with early results pointing toward a larger prize: faster permits, better-managed public assets, and the investment and jobs that follow.

Ho Chi Minh City: Faster Flood Response

Seasonal flooding can disrupt transportation, commerce, and daily life. Water levels can rise quickly, and decisions on where to deploy crews or how to advise residents depend on timely and reliable information.

With DT4PAG support, the city introduced the Flood Exposure Reporting and Decision-Support Platform (FEDS), a real-time system through which field staff capture water levels and locations via mobile devices, feeding a live shared dashboard. Report compilation time dropped from two hours to 90 minutes-a 25% reduction-with greater accuracy and consistency, while the data generated strengthens longer-term planning on flood hotspots and patterns.

"Based on this data, city leaders can develop appropriate solutions for flood prevention and control, while also providing timely updates to residents so they can proactively choose alternative routes," explained Vo Thi Trung Trinh, Director of the HCMC Digital Transformation Center.

The platform's biggest impact is still ahead. Two modules in development will allow authorities to prioritize flood mitigation investments and give residents live access to flood maps and real-time traffic rerouting. When fully operational, these features are estimated to generate up to VND 400 billion (~US$14 million) in annual travel time savings for citizens.

Da Nang: Mapping and Managing Public Assets

Public buildings such as offices, clinics, and cultural facilities are critical to service delivery. But when asset information is incomplete, or scattered across departments, cities struggle to plan maintenance, allocate budgets, and spot inefficient use.

In 2026, with project support, Da Nang developed a centralized geospatial Public Buildings Management System (PBMS) that now tracks more than 5,000 public buildings, standardizing data on location, condition, and use. The results: a full asset monitoring cycle that once took 34 hours now takes 11 hours-a 68% reduction-freeing staff to focus on analysis and action rather than data entry. The system is also helping the city identify public buildings that are underutilized or improperly rented out. Addressing even half of such cases is estimated to recover more than VND 1 trillion (~US$40 million) in public asset value annually.

"This will make it easier for us to manage and utilize assets, and develop proposals for their effective use," said Phan Duy Anh, Deputy Director of the Department of Finance. Effective utilization, he added, can help prevent waste and support budget revenue for development investment.

A second Da Nang pilot-the Hai Chau Ward Spatial Integrated Management Platform (SIMP)-tackled construction permit approvals. Using GIS-based spatial analysis, the platform cut processing times from 10 days to 3.75 days. A cost-benefit analysis estimated SIMP's benefits at eight times its investment cost.

Hue: Bringing Planning Online

Urban planning shapes how residents and businesses interact with government-through permits, land-use decisions, and development approvals. In Hue, that process had long been slowed by paper-based records, scattered information, and manual reviews.

Through DT4PAG, Hue created a citywide digital planning platform, integrating zoning maps, parcel data, and workflows into a unified GIS-based system. The platform aims to streamline reviews, improve consistency, and strengthen transparency for both officials and applicants.

"It shows the digitalization level of each planning project through a large, user-friendly interface, which makes management easier," said Tran Quang Hieu of the Department of Construction.

With Hue developing rapidly and its population exceeding 1.4 million, the platform provides decision-makers with tools to analyze shifting infrastructure supply and demand, manage urban sprawl, and balance competing economic, social, and environmental goals.

Experience from Hue and Ho Chi Minh City also fed directly into a new government decree and circular creating a national construction database modeled on international standards - extending the project's impact well beyond three pilot cities.

People and Processes: The Real Foundation

Technology alone doesn't transform government. DT4PAG invested heavily in the human side of reform, co-developing a Digital Government Academy with Fulbright University Viet Nam to build skills in digital leadership, data governance, and user-centered design. International study exchanges to Singapore, Malaysia, Switzerland, and Austria deepened peer learning, while national-local dialogues advanced a new regulatory framework for construction management and digital transformation.

"The practical lessons on user-centric design and data governance delivered during the DGA and knowledge exchanges have helped us improve the deployment of the Ho Chi Minh's city OneApp and OneMap," said Trinh from HCMC Digital Transformation Center.

What's next?

"Lasting digital transformation needs strong leadership, excellent coordination, as well as supportive legal and regulatory requirements to turn fragmented systems into a connected future," said Sibylle Bachmann, Head of Cooperation at the Embassy of Switzerland in Viet Nam. "Above all, it needs adequate investments into people's capacities, well-developed processes, and relevant technologies."

The early results from these cities suggest that when those foundations are in place, the returns are tangible. FEDS, PBMS, and SIMP - each proven at city scale - offer a replicable model for the dozens of Vietnamese cities navigating the same pressures of rapid growth, climate risk, and rising citizen expectations. Applied nationally, the compounding impact could be substantial: faster permits enabling investment, recovered public assets funding development, and a digitally skilled public workforce delivering better services across the country.

"These pilots prove how digital tools, when built around real needs, can fundamentally change how cities serve their people," said Mariam J. Sherman, World Bank Division Director for Viet Nam, Cambodia and Lao PDR. "They also offer practical, replicable models for other cities across Viet Nam, and can help inform the country's journey toward a fully digital, citizen-centric administration by 2030."