China has made tremendous progress in poverty eradication since the 1970’s. However, government poverty eradication measures became less effective with the remaining rural absolute poor. In the past decade the ratio of the rural absolute poor has stopped decreasing, and even increased in some years. Often it is the elderly, weak, sick and disabled people form the majority of the rural poor population: households fall into or remain in poverty because of lack of manpower, poor farming conditions or natural disasters, disease or injuries.

Our work in Sustainable Livelihoods programs seeks decrease poverty through increasing access to natural resources and infrastructure, which are currently lacking in many poor communities and limit household productivity. Rural poor often lack basic knowledge and skills to improve their livelihoods. This is further compounded by the fact that communities often lack the capacity to manage risks and families do not have access to community-based financial resources. Also, when many rural residents move to cities in search of work they face exclusion and marginalisation. Lastly, women are especially vulnerable to poverty as their school completion and literacy rate is generally lower than that of men.

The objectives of our work in Sustainable Livelihood programs are to improve community members’ participation in community affairs; improve women’s access to high-quality community based education, information, technology and training; increase the security of access to financial resources by community members; increase migrant workers’ inclusion in urban communities and assist in government adoption of best practice models for sustainable livelihood improvement.

Our Sustainable Livelihoods projects include the Rural Women’s Empowerment Project, which builds on the skills of rural women and to provides them with information and the opportunities to develop their role in supporting their communities - thus empowering rural women and creating sustainable, long-lasting improvements; the Social Inclusion of Migrant Labourers Project develops a comprehensive social inclusion model to help migrant workers integrate into urban communities; Plan China conducts a Community Organisation Capacity Building Project to help develop and improve the institutional capacity and economic sustainability of rural economic organisations; and lastly a Micro-credit Project that  provides skills training, market information, lending services and sustained support to women’s income generation initiatives.