International Conference on “Sustainable Development and Ethnic Minority Poverty Reduction”

Thai Nguyen. From June 11 to 13, 2014, a three-day conference on “Sustainable Development and Ethnic Minority Poverty Reduction” was hosted by Thai Nguyen University in partnership with the World Bank in Thai Nguyen.

The conference brought together participants from government agencies, academia development partners in Vietnam and other countries in the regions to discuss on sustainable poverty reduction among ethnic minority community in the mountainous regions. A key focus of the conference is on sharing experience of Vietnam and different countries with regard to promoting rural development among remote and dispersed rural mountainous communities.

Dr Phung Duc Tung was invited to present his study “Do the poorest ethnic minorities benefit from a large-scaled poverty reduction program? Evidence from Vietnam”. The study aims to analyze the effect of Program 135-Phase II on economic outcomes of households. It has contributed to existing literature on impact evaluation of large complex program and received close attention and brought about extensive discussion from the audience.

Besides, MDRI’s research on Ethnic Minority Poverty: What can be learnt from the success and failure cases was also selected to be displayed as the conference poster. The research was undertaken during 2013-2014 using the panel data of 6,000 households in 43 provinces collected in the Baseline and Endline Survey of Program 135-Phase II.