Poverty Rate among Ethnic Minorities Reduced

Vietnam is known as one of the most successful nations over the world in poverty reduction and economic development course in the last two decades. The poverty rate has gone down to 14 percent in 2008 from 58 percent in 1993. Land and commerce reforms are key factors for high and sustainable economic growth. Thanks to these reforms, three out of four poor people escaped poverty in this period. However, poverty reduction pace has slowed down and a vast majority of the poor live in remote rural areas which are places ethnic minority people reside.

 

So that poor households could have opportunities to benefit from economic results, the Government put Programme 135 – Phase 2 (CT135-II) in place. This is a large and the most important poverty reduction programme which provides support to ethnic minority groups and mountainous people.

 

CT135-II is a crucial socio-economic development and poverty reduction programme of the Vietnamese Government. With a view to evaluating the effectiveness of the programme and enhancing design capability of programmes in the future, the CEMA conducted the inception survey in 2007 under the assistance of UNDP and the final survey in 2012 under the assistance from UNDP and Embassy of Finland. Sample size included 600 households in 400 communes in 42 provinces. Methodical surveys were designed and systematic impact assessment procedure was applied, which helped the two surveys successfully provide comprehensive figures of the ethnic minority people in the most difficult and poorest areas.

 

Results of the reports show that the poverty rate of ethnic minority groups went down significantly (from 57.2 percent in 2007 to 49.2 percent in 2012), of which the Mong, Nung and Tay were the most successful groups. Poverty reduction was mainly attributed to increase in income though the increase tends to slow down gradually. In addition, poverty reduction in communes benefiting from CT135-II is yet to be sustainable. The re-poverty rate of households is still high (14.3 percent).

The programme exerted significant impact on the living standards of beneficiary families in targeted communes, particularly ethnic minority households. The income of such households witnessed a rise of 20 percent in five years’ period although this increase was still much lower than the average rate of the country which is about 50 percent. Poorer households saw less increase in their income against those with better financial conditions. The gap between poorer and non-poor families in these communes gets wider and wider.

 

Housing conditions were improved considerably in all the households. However, usage of clean water and standard toilets was still limited. Clean water remains a burning issue. Only 13 percent of ethnic minority households had running water while the relevant figure at national level was 27 percent in 2010.

 

The reports also point out that there was remarkable improvement in access to electricity of communes involved in CT135-II. The rate of households having electricity rose up to 83.6 percent in 2012 from 68.6 percent in 2007. 

 

CT135-II gained noticeable success in implementing the approach with participation of local people. In 2010, about 85 percent of works/projects of CT135-II organised meetings to select works at localities. The rate of families getting information of such meetings was 56.1 percent and 79.3 percent in 2007 and 2010, respectively. These changes reflect great improvement compared to phase I and other programmes. Beneficiaries got involved in every phase of the programme, including selection of works, implementation process, supervision and contribution to the maintenance fund. Financial transparency was also improved at certain level.

 

At the same time, the reports show that the target of all of the communes being capable of acting as owners of works/projects at the end of the programme was not reached as expected. However, thanks to HR capacity development, the number of works/projects in which communes acted as project owners was doubled in 2012 (45.9 percent), which reflects improvement in communes’ capacity to become owners.

 

Besides, the level of impact by CT135-II depends on added resources for targeted communes. However, while communes involved in the programme received greater fund from the programme’s fund compared to those not involved, they saw a dramatic decrease in the fund they got from other sources. The results set for the objective of narrowing the development gap among communes in CT135-II and other communes as well as the gap between poor and non-poor households and Kinh and ethnic minority households are very difficult to be achieved. Moreover, reallocation of budget out of programme 135 caused difficulty to identification of impacts of CT135 and made the programme’s impacts to be underestimated.

 

As such, the reports recommend that these issues be solved and monitored in the next programmes in order to guarantee that the fund to be allocated to targeted groups will not affect local authorities’ decisions over allocation of other fund sources.

 

According to the CEMA, new approaches and achieved impacts prove that CT135-II provided effective assistance to hunger eradication and poverty alleviation and socio-economic development efforts in mountainous areas. Lessons from CT135-II will continue to be improved for CT135 (period of 2012-2015) and the following years.