Ha Ngoc Chien, Chairman of the National Assembly’s Ethnic Affairs Council (Photo: quochoi.vn)

The program, consisting of 10 projects, will be implemented in mountain areas where ethnic minorities comprise 15% or more of the  population. Projects will focus on solving shortages of residential land, houses, production land, and water, increasing agricultural and forestry production, promoting regional strengths and value chains, improving education and training, and combining cultural preservation with tourism development.

Ha Ngoc Chien, Chairman of the National Assembly’s Ethnic Affairs Council, said: “This program focuses both on socio-economic development and on integrating more than 100 ethnic policies. It hopes to solve shortcomings in the implementation of current ethnic policies, create new opportunities for ethnic minority development, and narrow the development and income gap between ethnic minorities and the national average.”

The program, with 12 billion USD in capital, has the goal of raising ethnic minority incomes to at least half the national average, lowering the poverty rate below 10%, and reducing to zero number of  extremely disadvantaged groups.