Yunnan village girl opens embroidery plants to battle poverty

Hou Youlin is a 26-year-old girl from Xindian Village in east Yunnan’s Fuyuan County. She used to be a migrant embroiderer in Zhejiang for two years.

Since she returned home to start her own business in 2017, Hou Youlin has joined hands with local villager committees in setting up 21 embroidery factories for poverty alleviation, benefiting more than 3,000 left-behind women from 1,000 poor families in her hometown.

Before working in Zhe jiang, Hou had been running lottery shop in Kunming. In 2015, she gave up the lottery business and kicked off a migrant life.

Having worked in Zhejiang for two years, she came up with the idea of starting her own business. Thinking of the rich labor in his hometown, Hou and the Yiwu-based embroidery factory signed a contract on opening new processing branches in the Yunnan village. 

In June 2018, the poor fellow villagers moved to new homes at resettlement site and Hou also moved her embroidery plants near the site accordingly.

"The embroidery factory is next to my new home, and I work while taking care of my family,” said Huang Taoyu, a resettled woman. “I earn more than 2,000 yuan a month, and we’re happy to work in the factory." 

To benefit more poverty-stricken households in the village, Hou Youlin opened 21 poverty-alleviation factories in the neighboring villages under the permission of local management.

As more and more people were benefited, embroidery has formed a trend among women in the villages. Hou and her embroidery plants have become signature of the poverty alleviation projects in Fuyuan county.

Through one-on-one training, Hou has trained more than 3,000 fellow villagers on embroidery skills so far.

Some youngster offered to work in the poverty-alleviation factories, and Hou Youlin sent 60 of them to learn in the Yiwu general factory. “Equipped with in the future, they can return to their villagers to lead more people out of poverty,” said Hou. 

In early 2019, the factory trained 114 full-time employees and launched the online sales, adding a new channel to market their embroidery products.

Reporting by Guo Yan (Xinhua); trans-editing by Wang Shixue