To monitor changes in poverty conditions for dynamic management by targeted measures, each poor household identified will be put on an archived file, with details of family members, poverty situation, possible reasons for poverty, aid or help received, etc. As required, updates should be entered based on any change in the poverty situation, either improvement or deterioration, in order to ensure that the policies and methods to help each household are accurate and pertinent.

A great amount of work is needed to complete this work. Tasks have to be broken down from the upper level to lower ones. Millions of government officials have to be sent to the poor county or village level, some responsible for the whole county's poverty alleviation while some responsible for a single poor village.

Hebian is a small village of Mengla County in Xishuangbanna Autonomous Prefecture of Yunnan Province, which is located in a nature reserve in southwest China. There are 212 villagers living in 59 households, all of them Yao people (an ethnic minority group).

The villagers' average income is under that of the farmers in Yunnan Province as a whole. Infrastructure, such as road, housing, sanitation, safe drinking water supply system, etc. are all in poor conditions. Surrounded by mountains and rivers in a sub-tropical region, villagers have few methods to improve as business is prohibited in the nature reserve. Lack of education for the majority of villagers means they are hardly able to find stable jobs in towns or cities as migrant workers.

Yunnan Province has the second largest poverty-stricken population in China, of which many are the poorest across the whole country. Governments at each level have been taking a leading role in helping the poor combat poverty ever since, and their achievements in poverty alleviation is widely recognized.

Even so, Hebian did not benefit much from previous government efforts on infrastructure investment and industrial development, along with some other poor villages, all suffering from geographical and educational disadvantages and fragile ecosystem. Many villagers have received subsistence allowances from the government, but that is not enough to raise them out of poverty.

Targeted measures have exposed the plight of such villagers. The files for village as a whole and for individual villagers have been established, and local government officials are working with a local NGO - Xiaoyun Zhupin (Action Against Poverty) - to make a tailored development plan with government programs, social funds and voluntary work, etc., all targeting specific difficulties. Hopefully, in this way, the government and NGO can find a way to work together in the anti-poverty campaign.

Dr. Wang Chunlai is graduated from Rural Development Institute of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

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