"She power" plays indispensable role in poverty alleviation (14)

Feng Yahong uses a mobile phone to give feedbacks to customers about vegetables they ordered outside a freezer in Xiji County, northwest China's Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, Oct. 29, 2020. Xihaigu, one of China's most impoverished areas located in Ningxia, saw its last impoverished county removed from the national poverty list on Nov. 16, 2020. The victory is another landmark in China's campaign to eradicate absolute poverty, during which "she power" played an indispensable role. Feng Yahong, a 33-year-old rural woman living in the areas, has helped many local women get rid of poverty through leading them in planting vegetables. She used to be a vegetable peddler. For pursuing a better life, in 2009, she tried to rent some greenhouses to start her vegetable planting business. In Xihaigu, most men worked away from home to earn money to support families but women were left behind to take care of family members. Feng hired many local rural women as vegetable growers. In 2012, they jointly started a vegetable planting cooperative. At the beginning of the business, Feng suffered lots of setbacks, such as a failure of producing qualified vegetables and a fire in the greenhouses. Those failures nearly led her into despair because she had used up all her money and even couldn't pay the workers she hired. However, so as not to disappoint people who trusted in her, Feng pulled herself up soon and kept trying all kinds of ways to raise money for paying off debts. Fortunately, she managed to get a loan from the local Women's Federation so that she could restart her vegetable business. Learning from previous failures, Feng gradually made her business on a right track. Now, during busy farming seasons, there are over 300 employees working in her cooperative. As Feng's business grows, the wages of those women worker have dramatically increased, and the members of the cooperative can also get a bonus every year. (Xinhua/Wang Peng)