Vietnam will make efforts to maintain sustainable poverty reduction as improving people’s livelihood is one of key measures to keep the country’s economic growth and ensuring good social welfare for all walks of life, especially disadvantaged people, Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung said on Feb 5. State agencies must carry out programs that help keep poverty under control while local authorities need to maximize resources in the fight against poverty, instead of relying on the state budget, Mr. Dung said at an online conference in Hanoi. Vietnam has worked out programs to reduce poverty rate over the past decades but the results are not as expected due to corruption. The communist country said that it spent an estimated VND864 trillion ($41.14 billion) on fighting against poverty during 2005-2012. The programs over the years benefit 531,000 poor households, reducing the poverty rate to 7.8% in 2013 from 22% in 2005. But it is believed that a large amount of the annual spending has gone to feed the administration system instead. At the meeting, Mr. Dung urged state agencies to use the state budget effectively and asked the Vietnam Bank for Social Policies to expand the number of poor and near-poor households receiving credit support. In fact, poor people find hard to access the soft loans though the country has borrowed billions dollar from foreign funds to implement poverty reduction programs. Currently, the 90-million people country has around 5.2 million poor people. (Thanh Nien – Young People Feb 6 p3)
