HCM City looks to bring down poverty rate

The city looks to reduce the number of poor households to 60,000 by year-end. The near-poor households will also be brought down to about 49,800, or 2.55% of the city’s population.

These targets were announced by the city’s vice chairwoman Nguyen Thi Thu as part of a sustainable poverty reduction program for the 2016-2020 period.

Under the new poverty criteria applied from January 24, 2014, households with annual income per capita of less than VND16 million are categorized as poor, compared to the prior threshold of VND12 million. Ho Chi Minh City’s poverty line is in fact the highest and three times higher than the national level for urban areas.

Due to this higher poverty line, the poor households in the city soared to a staggering 130,000, or 7.12% of the population. Previously, it had 16,000 poor households, or 0.8%, based on the old criteria.

With the new anti-poverty program for the next five years, the city will ensure sustainable results and prevent a return to poverty.

To achieve these goals, it will raise public awareness of the program with a multi-dimensional approach to make sure all agencies and residents understand and participate.

To assist the poor, Ho Chi Minh City will re-launch a fund to create jobs for people relocated to make room for public projects. It will also improve healthcare for the poor and near-poor households and ensure that all of them have access to health insurance.

In March, the city surveyed 450,000 households in order to create a new set of criteria to determine poor and near-poor households for the 2016-2020 period.

Apart from income, five social dimensions have been included to better reflect the multidimensionality of modern poverty: education, healthcare, employment and social insurance, living conditions, and access to information.

There are 11 indicators measuring the social dimensions: education levels of adults, schooling for children, vocational qualifications, access to health services, health insurance, employment, social insurance, housing, water supply, use of telecom services, and devices for access to information.

Households will be evaluated against the social dimensions with a score for each of the indicators. More points mean being worse off or closer to poverty. The first nine indicators can be scored up to 10 points each and the two remaining indicators are given five points.

Under the city’s updated criteria, a household is ranked as poor when its annual income per capita is below VND21 million and/or it has 40 points or more for the five poverty dimensions. Meanwhile, a household will be categorized as near poor when it has average annual per capita income of VND21-VND28 million and has less than 40 points.