Challenges to Rural Poverty Reduction in Viet Nam - Oxfam Blogs

Five-year Synthesis Report
Part 2: Challenges to Rural Poverty Reduction in Viet Nam
Many households do not want to be removed from the list of poor households.
Annual poverty surveys and reviews in each village are difficult. Many people are reluctant
to disclose their true income as they wish to be included in the poor household list. Those
on the list receive free medical insurance cards, concessional loans, seeds, temporary
housing elimination support, financial support for children’s nursery and general school
fees, financial support during Tet (traditional Lunar New Year) and electricity subsidies.
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Poverty surveys and reviews face a number of difficulties. The annual poverty review
follows MOLISA procedures. Officials and local residents proposed several reasons for
inaccurate poverty reviews:
• The current income poverty line does not correspond to people’s basic
expenditures, particularly in periods of high inflation.
• There is a fine line between poor and near-poor households.
• The capacity of grassroots officials is limited, particularly in mountainous ethnic
minority communes, and training for the poverty review is not conducted
carefully.
• Pre-determined “poverty reduction” targets and plans also put pressure on
grassroots cadres.
• Local residents prefer to remain on the poverty list in order to receive assistance.
The "poor household“ list is not separated from the "targeting criteria“ of
support policies. According to current regulations, households with an average income
of less than 400,000 VND per person per month are classified as "poor households“
and are eligible for supports designated for the poor. This situation makes the poverty
reviews being difficult and heavy, because there is a big incentive difference between
the households in the list and those not in the list.
The poor need to be further categorised for more effective support. There are many
reasons households are poor. Assistance should be tailored to the needs of households
with specific characteristics:
• The extremely poor tend to be disabled, suffering long-term illness, elderly
and single, or single parents with young children. They tend to have limited or
poor quality land, low levels of education, minimal proficiency in the Vietnamese
language and no skills. Most are in the “chronically poor” group and are unable
to escape poverty, are regularly short of food and relying on small grants from
relatives and villagers. Regular social assistance policies do help some extremely
poor households. However, by increasing the amount of regular social assistance,
tending to the needs of extremely poor households minimal living standards can
be assured 23 .
• The temporarily poor are the largest proportion of poor households. The
temporarily poor have labour, but lack capital, technical knowledge, and access
to markets to escape poverty. Effective policy should target capacity building, the
generation of opportunities and the reduction of direct grants for the temporarily
poor group.
• The vulnerable poor are typically households who live in disaster-prone
areas. Policies should focus on mitigating risks associated with natural disasters,
particularly as a result of climate change. Vulnerable households are also
susceptible to sickness, epidemics, pests, diseases, and accidents. Others have
specific social characteristics; for example they are geographically isolated
23 The “Social Security Floor” initiative, jointly sponsored by the International Labour Organization (ILO) and
the World Health Organization (WHO), is to promoting integrated strategies in order to ensure minimum level
of social security for all, including ensuring access of everyone to basic social services and income security.