Hanoi (VNA) – The Vietnam Bank for Social Policies has provided an average of over5.3 trillion VND (233.2 million USD) in soft loans for more than 630,000 poorhouseholds in the Northwest every year to help them escape from poverty.
According to the Northwest Steering Committee, thanks tothe soft loans, the region’s poverty rate fell from nearly 35 percent in 2011to below 11 percent at the end of 2016 and about 375,000 jobs were created.
The loans also helped more than 368,000 students fromdifficult backgrounds continue their education; and build approximately 940,000systems for clean water supply and rural environment sanitation.
The regional rate of bad debt only remained around 0.25percent.
Since 2016, northwestern provinces have takencomprehensive measures to support impoverished households so that they canimprove their income and take part in rural job matching programmes.
The region’s poorest districts have been offered morethan 1 trillion VND (44 million USD) to remove slums; build schools and medicalstations; and provide vocational training for the locals.
A recent report estimated that about 30,000 poorhouseholds and 3,573 people in the region have received support in the firstquarter of 2017. The number of people escaped from poverty rose by 5 percentfrom the same period last year.-VNA
Soft loans in northwest region effective in poverty alleviation
Soft loans provided in the northwestern region helped lift more than 318,000 families out of poverty between 2011 and 2015.