A News on Livelihood Enhancement of Batch1 Target Villages, Phoukout District, Xiengkhouang Province in May 2026
Phou Kout is a district of Xiengkhouang province in north-central Laos and remains poor status. Around the district, there are 3 clusters covering with 43 villages, with 5,537 households, total population 28,639 (14,024 women), 1,411 poor households equal to 27%. Three main groups are Lao Loum (56,7%), Hmong (21,4%), and Khmu (21,9%).
At the end of 2024, the CLEAR project selects Phoukhout as target district covering 32 villages in the two batches, 16 villages for the first batch and other 16 villages for the second batch. Under the livelihood component, 36 self-help groups (SHGs) were setup with 905 SHG members. In the meantime, 112 village SHG management committees were selected including 95 women. After SHG setup, the district livelihood officer (DLO) and young graduate (YGs) conducted four training modules for SHG members and VSMC, including the technical agriculture extension both for crops and livestock, and the family investment plan (FIP). Finally, the team released the seed grant from the CLEAR project in total amount of 3,632,595,000 LAK to all SHG members to implement their Income Generation Activities (IGA) such as corn growing (495fms) produced 111tons in worth of 420,100,000 Lak, pig (202fms) produced 2,342kg in worth of 126,054,000 Lak, local chicken (55fms) produced 1,555 kg in worth of 186,600,000 Lak, local duck (28fms) produced 1,067 kg in worth of 105,600,000 Lak, goat (26fms) produced 103kg in worth of 7,920,000 Lak, fish (8fms) produced 1,028kg in worth of 72,870,000 Lak, vegetables (35fms) produced 207kg in worth of 2,881,000 Lak, Job’s Teers (9fms) produced 3,000kg in worth of 24,000,000 Lak, weaving (41fms) produced 1,607 pieces of Lao skirts and shop retail (6fms) earned 31,700,000 Lak. Total income of IGAs is about 1,138,425,000 Lak.
Presently, the live of SHG members in each target villages of CLEAR is improved compared before the project support. They paid their loan and interest back to the SHG and request the second loan do the IGAs continually.
