On May 26, 2026, Deputy Prime Minister Ho Quoc Dung signed Decision 940/QD-TTg approving a plan to turn VNeID — Vietnam's national digital identity application — into an all-in-one "super app" for the 2026-2030 period, with a vision to 2045. The decision positions VNeID as the central gateway for administrative procedures, online public services, electronic transactions and digital utilities. By the end of 2028, the plan envisions that all individual and organisational documents, along with mobile subscriptions, will be authenticated on the platform; by 2030, around 70 per cent of VNeID's utilities and services are to incorporate artificial intelligence (Biometric Update).
This is not a greenfield experiment. VNeID already carries more than 70 million Level-2 accounts and hosts 21 online public services and 15 categories of electronic documents (Nhan Dan). Since July 1, 2024, citizens have been required to use VNeID to access online public services such as criminal-record certificates, social-security benefits and health-insurance cards (VnEconomy). Decision 940 takes a rail that is already mandatory and makes it the rail for nearly everything.
The case for consolidation is real
The strongest argument for a single super-app is genuine, and worth stating plainly. Fragmented e-government — dozens of portals, logins and standards — is itself an exclusion problem: every additional account and password is a barrier for a low-literacy or first-time user. A unified, identity-verified front door can collapse that complexity, cut the time and travel cost of in-person bureaucracy, and route social-welfare payments directly to recipients. Decision 940's target that 100 per cent of welfare and pension beneficiaries hold payment accounts by 2028 is, on paper, a financial-inclusion goal. Done well, one well-designed app can be more accessible than twenty mediocre websites.
That is precisely why the design floor matters — and why the plan's silence on it is the problem.
The accessibility gap the plan does not address
Vietnam's own data shows the populations most exposed. Persons with disabilities make up about 6.11 per cent of the population aged two and over. In 2024, only 42.5 per cent of them reported having internet access — against a national internet-use rate of 84.15 per cent (World Bank via Trading Economics). The gap is not closing fast: disabled internet access rose just 3.6 points from 2023. Worse, the share of persons with disabilities reporting no difficulty accessing public administrative services fell from 76.6 per cent in 2023 to 69.7 per cent in 2024, with hearing- and speech-impaired users worst affected — 46.7 per cent struggled to access services (Vietnam Law Magazine).
The cashless ambition compounds the risk. Decision 940 wants 70 per cent of users paying bills through VNeID by 2030 — yet only 11.9 per cent of persons with disabilities currently hold a personal bank account, and 75.1 per cent still receive their disability allowance in cash. A platform that assumes a smartphone, data connectivity, a bank account and the digital literacy to operate an AI-personalised interface will, without deliberate countermeasures, route benefits away from the people who most depend on them.
None of the published descriptions of Decision 940 set a binding accessibility standard, a non-digital fallback guarantee, or a service-level target for assisted access. The milestones are about coverage, AI penetration and cashless adoption — outputs that are easy to measure and politically attractive — not about the harder question of who gets left at the threshold.
Proportionate fixes, not a slower rollout
The answer is not to slow VNeID down. It is to attach a thin, enforceable accessibility layer to the rollout — the kind of proportionate, evidence-based regulation that makes ambitious digital infrastructure durable rather than divisive.
- Codify a binding standard. Vietnam already references WCAG 2.0 as a compliance benchmark, and Law 51/2010/QH12 (the Law on Persons with Disabilities) and the 2014 ratification of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities supply the legal hooks. Decision 940's promised 2028 legal framework should make WCAG 2.1 AA conformance a precondition for any service migrating onto VNeID — auditable, with published results.
- Guarantee a non-digital channel by law. No public service should become app-only without a mandated in-person or assisted-access alternative at commune level, plus continued cash disbursement of allowances for those who choose it. Mandatory digital is acceptable; exclusively digital is not.
- Fund the assisted-access layer. The plan already imagines AI commune-level governance assistants. Pairing those with trained human helpers at local offices — for the elderly and the 25.7 per cent of disabled users facing access difficulties — turns the AI from a substitute for staff into a force-multiplier for them.
- Publish disaggregated metrics. If VNeID reports adoption only in aggregate, the inclusion gap stays invisible. Coverage figures should be broken down by disability, age and region, so the 2030 review can see who the 70-per-cent targets are leaving behind.
The stakes
Vietnam is building one of the world's more ambitious state digital platforms, and the consolidation logic is sound. But when a single rail becomes the only way to claim a pension, prove identity or pay a bill, accessibility stops being a courtesy and becomes a precondition for citizenship in practice. The window to embed that floor is the 2028 legal-framework phase Decision 940 itself promises. Writing an accessibility mandate into that framework now — before services go app-only — is cheaper, fairer and more credible than retrofitting one after the people on the wrong side of the divide have already been cut off.