Poverty Assessment in Terms of Safe Drinking Water, Hygiene Facilities, and Energy of Minority Nationalities————A Case Study on the A Ba Autonomous Prefecture of Tibetan and Qiang Nationalities

Abstract

Since 2002, the Trinity Mode has been adopted in China to include safe drinking water and sanitation services in order to change the services into public products of rural communities. These products would contain multi-valued attributes of miniature infrastructure constructions, primary health care, and ecological protection. Poverty reduction demands different policies with extended connotation and changed features, from increasing income to improving welfare services, from a macroscopic to a microscopic viewpoint, from the national level to that of communities, and from the indistinguishable to an individual. Against such background, A Ba Prefecture is selected as the case study area. Safe drinking water and sanitation services, the most important components of basic public health services, are selected as the research object in the study, and both sanitation and health are included in the framework to analyze poverty. Altogether, 5637 valid questionnaires of “The Investigation on Poverty Alleviation in A Ba Prefecture in2009”have been carefully studied. The study shows that great achievements have been made in alleviating poverty in A Ba by improving the drinking water in rural areas. However, a huge amount of work is needed to apply hygiene facilities and popularize clean energy. Hence, the government’s antipoverty policies should be strengthened in the latter two aspects.