GUIYANG, Oct. 6 (Xinhua) -- Due to the impact of the coronavirus epidemic, Wang Xuya was unable to leave her hometown for work after the Spring Festival in late January this year.

As Wang, who lived in a remote village in southwest China's Guizhou Province, was worried about her income, the provincial power grid corporation came to her aid, providing her with training sessions on electricity-related knowledge.

After months of training, Wang passed an electrician's test and became one of the over 700 new employees of the company.

As China is in the homestretch to realize its goal of eradicating absolute poverty by the end of 2020, enterprises and social groups have played a big part in providing assistance to people in need, effectively supplementing government-led efforts.

Since late 2015, Evergrande Group, a leading real estate developer in China, has donated about 11 billion yuan (about 1.61 billion U.S. dollars) in poverty-alleviation funding to the city of Bijie, one of the most impoverished areas in Guizhou.

Evergrande has focused its anti-poverty efforts in Bijie in establishing a fruit and vegetable production base and a livestock breeding base, aiming to build them into major food producers in southwest China, said Yao Dong, a vice president of Evergrande.

Since the Chinese conglomerate Wanda Group began to provide one-on-one assistance to Danzhai in 2015, an impoverished county in Guizhou, the company has donated or invested a total of 2.3 billion yuan, helping some 58,800 poor people increase their incomes. The county has turned into a popular tourist destination thanks to this enterprise-led anti-poverty effort.

On the question of how to lift Danzhai out of poverty, it took Wanda nearly a year's research to finally decide on tourism, after scrapping the options of pig farming and tea planting, said Wanda Chairman Wang Jianlin.

Wanda's poverty alleviation project in Danzhai not only directly created jobs but also helped inherit ethnic minority cultures and uplift the spirits of local people, said Deng Guosheng, a professor with the School of Public Policy and Management of Tsinghua University.

According to the All-China Federation of Industry and Commerce (ACFIC), a total of 109,500 privately-owned enterprises had joined in a poverty alleviation program targeting poverty-stricken villages in China by June this year.

These private businesses have helped 127,100 villages, including 68,900 registered poverty-stricken villages, Fan Youshan, ACFIC vice chairman, told a forum held in Danzhai in September.

The firms have helped create 799,000 jobs and trained 1.16 million people, benefiting a registered poverty-stricken population of 15.64 million. Enditem

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