Bến Tre Province effectively reduces poverty

Lâm Hồng Phượng in Bến Tre Province’s Giồng Trôm District feeds her goats. Her family has escaped poverty after being provided a soft loan for breeding animals. — VNA/VNS Photo Chương Đài

BẾN TRE — Bến Tre Province has effectively taken measures to reduce poverty sustainably and improve the lives of the poor.

The Cửu Long (Mekong) Delta province has provided soft loans, vocational skill training, jobs, free health insurance and other support for poor households.

Lâm Hồng Phượng, 44, in Giồng Trôm District’s Bình Hoà Commune, used to be poor and has been provided a soft loan worth VNĐ25 million (US$1,000) from Việt Nam Bank for Social Policy’s Tiền Giang Branch to breed cows.

After a few years, she increased the number of her cattle and began breeding goats, escaping poverty in 2022, she said.

She earned VNĐ60 million ($2,400) from selling two cows and 20 goats last month, she said.

“Thanks to the soft loan, her family has money to breed cattle, build a house and pay the fees for their children to go to school,” she said.

The province has launched many programmes to help poor people such as the emulation movement “For the poor – leaving no one behind.”

Ba Tri District, which has a high rate of poor households, has taken many creative measures to help the poor escape poverty.

It has introduced effective poverty reduction models to poor households and taken up advocacy activities to enhance their awareness of proactively escaping poverty.

Over the past three years, it has provided free health insurance cards for all poor households, built charity houses for more than 400 poor households, and implemented dozens of poverty reduction models which breed cows and goats, with the participation of hundreds of poor households.

The district is implementing sustainable measures to reduce poverty such as providing vocational skills for rural labourers, creating jobs and diversify livelihoods for them.

The average income per capita of rural people in the province was VNĐ55 million ($2,200) last year, up VNĐ2 million from 2022.

The province had 10,600 poor households as of the end of last year, accounting for 2.6 per cent of its total households.

Trần Ngọc Tam, chairman of the province People’s Committee, said the province would synchronously implement existing national target programmes to create sustainable jobs for the poor, improve their livelihoods, increase their ability to access basic social services, and reduce the poverty rate and the gap between rich and poor households.

The province aimed to reduce the poverty rate to 2.3 per cent this year, he said.

To achieve the target, it would help the poor access soft loans and use them effectively, instruct them on production methods and techniques, assist them with linkages in production to secure sales for their products.

It would expand effective poverty reduction models, and promote the potential and advantages of each locality and the participation of the poor and communities in reducing poverty.

It would implement promptly and sufficiently policies about social welfare and poverty reduction, giving priority to activities of training vocational skills and introducing jobs. — VNS