The northern province of Ninh Binh has applied a variety of measures to reduce the number of local poor households to below 4 percent by 2015.

Vice Chairman of the provincial People’s Committee Le Van Dung said that the locality has focused on mobilising resources from State and local budgets, national target programmes, businesses and individuals for poor districts and extremely difficult communes in combination with the new-style rural building movement.

It has also created favourable conditions for international organisations to pour their cash into reducing poor households and creating jobs for local labourers as well as improving infrastructure and providing basic social services in rural and mountainous areas.

Attention has been paid to getting the community’s involvement in poverty reduction programmes and including socio-economic development projects in the regional development planning.

According to Dung, the province now has more than 30,000 poor households mainly living in remote and mountainous areas, making up 12.39 percent of its total population.

The ratio of households living in poverty has seen an average annual drop of 2 percent, a quick but unsustainable reduction, he said.

Since 2006, the province has supported more than 38,000 households to escape from poverty but over 13,000 of them relapsed into poverty, he said, adding that the poverty rate increased from 6.88 percent in late 2010 to the current 12.39 percent due to the new poverty standard applied for the 2011-15 period.

Under the new standard, which was approved by the Government , poor households are categorised as those with an average income of 400,000 VND ( 18.8 USD) per person per month in rural areas and 500,000 VND (23.5 USD) in urban areas.-VNA