The Asian Development Bank (ADB) said Tuesday it will help improve and expand financial services to the rural poor in underdeveloped areas of Guizhou and the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region (IMAR) in China, through a technical assistance (TA) grant of 1 million US dollars.

The ADB said in a statement that the assistance, from the Poverty Reduction Cooperation Fund, will restructure and improve the regulation of existing rural credit cooperatives in the two regions, and promote the development of microfinance institutions as an additional mechanism for delivering rural credit.

According to the ADB, in Inner Mongolia, one of China's largest provinces and autonomous regions, rural households account for 64 percent of the population and about half of the rural counties are classified as either national or regional poverty counties.

In Guizhou, a mountainous agricultural area and the poorest province in China, 87 percent of the population lives in rural areas and poverty incidence is three times the national average, it said.

"Over the last three to four years, IMAR and Guizhou have seen rapid economic growth, fueled mainly by nonagricultural sectors such as resource-intensive industries, small-and-medium-sized enterprises, and tourism," said Ying Qian, an ADB principal financial economist.

"To sustain this growth and ensure that it benefits the poor, a range of affordable and sustainable financial services must be made available to the rural sector," added Betty Wilkinson, an ADB microfinance specialist.

Source: Xinhua