With the help of local government, workshops built for poverty relief by villagers who have started their businesses in other places have been providing jobs for poor residents in Zhenxiong County of southwest China's Yunnan Province.

The local preferential policies for poverty alleviation have attracted entrepreneurs to start business here. And the workshops they created are effectively helping many impoverished villagers to cast off poverty.

In one of the workshops, many workers were busy making masks to fulfill orders from overseas buyers.

"I can earn 100 to 200 yuan (about 15 to 30 U. S. dollars) a day. If I keep working, I can gain 5,000 to 6,000 yuan per month," said a worker.

Before working here, the worker earned only about 150 U. S. dollars a month, a fifth of what she earns now.

"The highest salary for an employee is 12,000 yuan while the lowest is around 3,000 yuan. The average salary is 3,500 yuan," said the manager of the workshop.

The county government is actively supporting the entrepreneurs to create jobs for locals. It has appropriated a total of 10.65 million yuan or about 1.6 million U.S. dollars to help enterprises purchase equipment, build factory, and train workers. The local government also invested in the enterprises by leasing out equipment and factory buildings, and the dividends yielded are used for the village collective economy and poverty relief.

"From 2015 to 2019, the central government and provincial government invested nearly 620 billion yuan, of which the central government funds exceeded 480 billion yuan and the rest 140 billion were from the provincial funds, with the average annual growth rate of over 22 percent. Such a large-scale investment will help all the 6.85 million poor residents in our province to shake off extreme poverty by the end of this year," said Zhang Yansong, head of Yunnan Provincial Department of Finance.

The development of workshops of Zhenxiong County is a microcosm of poverty alleviation efforts in Yunnan. As a border province with the largest number of impoverished residents and greatest difficulties in poverty reduction, Yunnan received a large amount of state funds for this purpose.