Tra Vinh (VNA) – The Mekong Delta province of Tra Vinh is allocatingover 36 billion VND (1.58 million USD) to provide residential land for 1,474poor local households of the Khmer ethnic minority group.
The sum, of which nearly 32.8 billion VND (1.44 million USD) comes fromthe State budget and the rest from local budget, is the second round of assistancethat the province has given to the needy in accordance with the PrimeMinister’s Decision 29/2013/QD-TTg on land and employment policies for ethnicminority people in the Mekong Delta region.
In the 2014-2016 period, the province offered 728,712 square meters of residentialland worth 65.2 billion VND (2.86 million USD) to 2,010 ethnic minority households.
In addition, the Tra Vinh branch of the Vietnam Bank for Social Policiesalso provided loans worth over 38 billion VND (1.67 million USD) in total to3,795 ethnic minority families to help them stablise livelihoods and developproduction.
Kien Banh, deputy head of the Tra Vinh Division of Ethnic Affairs, saidthat Tra Vinh has nearly 328,000 Khmerpeople, accounting for 31.5 percent of the province’s population.
Over the past years, the province has paid great attention to improvingtheir living conditions.
In 2016, the number of poor households in the province was over 30,000,down more than 2 percent compared to the figure in 2015, with poverty ratioamong the Khmer community dropped by 2.66 percent.-VNA