HCM City to spend $158m in poverty fight

Ho Chi Minh City will allocate more than VND3 trillion (US$158 million) for the city's 2010 poverty alleviation programme to reduce the number of poor households to 6.6 per cent, from last year's figure of 7.21 per cent or 130,645 households.

The programme would provide preferential loans to 10,000 to 15,000 poor households to start businesses, to ensure average incomes in the households exceed the HCM City poverty line of VND12 million per year, deputy director of the municipal Department of Labour, Invalids and Social Affairs, Nguyen Van Xe told a meeting yesterday to outline the programme objectives this year.

Preferential bank loans for poor households were estimated to reach VND2.3 trillion by the end of the year, Xe said.

Funding from the city and districts' budgets for this year's poverty alleviation programme was VND160 billion with the rest of the allocation coming from various sources, he said.

Some 1,300 poor households with individual members' average incomes less than VND6 million would be given priority to improve living standards during the year.

At least 20,000 households with members' yearly incomes averaging less than VND8 million would receive financial support to raise them to more than VND8 million, he said.

It would assist all primary school and junior high school dropouts in returning to school and try to prevent new dropouts in the new school year of 2010-2011.

Thirty to 50 per cent of the poor with annual earnings between VND8 million and VND12 million would be encouraged to buy compulsory health insurance with a yearly 50 per cent subsidy.

The city granted nearly 310,000 health insurance cards to poor people during the first month of the year.

Poverty alleviation, which is one of the top policy priorities in the city's socio-economic development, aims to improve the income of poor households, improve living standards and the access of the poor to social welfare services, according to Nguyen Thanh Tai, deputy chairman of the city's People's Committee.

"The results of the programme over the last few years are not sustainable and comprehensive and there are still a lot of challenges to face," Tai said.

The poverty line was raised to just under VND12 million per person per year last year.

The new line meant more than 152,000 poor households with nearly 690,000 people or 8.4 per cent of the number of households in the city were recognised as living below the poverty line last year.

Last year the programme helped more than 19,000 poor households to raise their members' average yearly incomes to more than VND12 million, according to a department report.

Last year, the city provided more than VND78 billion to help poor people get health insurance cards, VND76 billion of which was used to grant free cards to 450,000 people with incomes of VND8 million and below, and the rest to subsidise half of insurance coverage for nearly 29,000 people with incomes between VND8 million and VND12 million.

The 2009 programme helped reduce the number of school dropouts to 6,723 from 21,847 students in 2008.

The program has so far helped 2,500 poor people using three – or four-wheel self-modified vehicles to transition into other businesses, accounting for 95 per cent of the total number of users.

The programme received total funding of VND2.32 trillion last year, an increase of VND565 billion against the previous year.