Vĩnh Long Province reduces poverty sustainably

The job of cutting straw mushroom offers stable income for many elderly women in Hoà Bình Commune in Vĩnh Long Province’s Trà Ôn District. The province has taken various measures to create jobs for people, especially the poor. – VNA/VNS Photo Lê Thuý Hằng

VĨNH LONG – Vĩnh Long Province has effectively taken measures to reduce poverty sustainably and improve the lives of poor people.

The Cửu Long (Mekong) Delta province has implemented many projects to diversify livelihoods, support people to produce and do business, develop vocational training and create jobs, helping many poor households escape poverty.

It has provided soft loans for poor households to enter business, and to work overseas.

In the past 10 years, the Việt Nam Bank for Social Policies’ Vĩnh Long Province Branch has provided soft loans worth a total of VNĐ6.5 trillion (US$256 million) for 260,000 households who are poor, near-poor and social policy beneficiaries.

Bùi Văn Nghiêm, secretary of the province Party Committee and chairman of the province People’s Council, said social policy credit has become an important pillar of the national target programme on sustainable poverty reduction, and this is the most widely implemented policy to meet the capital demands of the poor.

This policy has helped reduce the province’s poverty rate from 5.9 per cent in 2014 to 0.42 per cent last year, he said.

The province’s social-political organisations have implemented many measures to help poor households.

The province’s Women’s Unions at all levels have mobilised resources from programmes, projects and their members to help nearly 48,000 women develop family economics skills last year.

They provided vocational skills and introduced jobs for more than 13,000 women last year.

Nguyễn Thị Kim Anh, chairwoman of the provincial Women’s Union, said that with their activities supporting women to develop family finances, the province’s Women’s Unions at all levels have joined hands with localities to help poor households escape poverty.

There were 226 poor woman-headed households in the province escaping poverty last year, she said.

The province had 2,808 poor households at the end of last year. Most of them lack basic social service indicators such as employment, health insurance, housing, clean water and toilets.

The province will implement poverty reduction measures synchronously and assist the poor to access projects that provide soft loans from the Việt Nam Bank for Social Policies for them to produce and do business.

It will strengthen advocacy activities to enhance the awareness of the poor about their roles and responsibilities, as they are both subjects and beneficiaries of the poverty reduction programme, so that they will make more efforts to escape poverty sustainably.

It will increase co-operation with companies to create jobs for poor and near poor people to help them improve their lives and escape poverty sustainably.

In the first half of the year, the province created jobs for 14,935 people, including 850 going to work overseas, which meets 75 per cent of the province’s target of creating jobs for people this year, according to its People’s Committee. – VNS