The Tibet Poverty Alleviation Fund (TPAF) gives priority to projects able to strengthen the capacities of Tibetans to secure greater income and food security through employable skills training, promotion of household and small enterprises, agricultural and livestock development, natural resources preservation. TPAF also gives priority to projects that contribute to family health and well-being. We encourage local government to adopt poverty alleviation approaches found to be more effective in generating increased employment and income for local families, and in contributing to improved health and well-being.  

TPAF understands that successful poverty alleviation programs are built and implemented in collaboration with local Tibetan community leaders, local government officials and Tibetan training and service provision institutions that have long experience helping to improve Tibetan working opportunities and living standards.

Since its foundation, TPAF has concentrated its rural improvement programs primarily in poor villages of townships in Lhoka, Nakchu and Shigatse Prefectures of the Tibet Autonomous Region that represent the diversity of Tibetan culture and economic life. In the wake of difficulties in the TAR after the March 2008 uprising, TPAF shifted its poverty alleviation activities to poor communities in the six Tibetan Townships of Shangri-la County in Diqing Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, Yunnan Province. TPAF immediately commenced various employable skills training activities, and training of villagers in improved health, hygiene and nutrition behavior practices.

TPAF’s biggest new initiative in Shangri-la County in 2009 was the launching in December of a comprehensive 5-Year UN Millennium Development Goals program in villages of Dong Wang and Wu Jing Townships . This program is designed to achieve quantitative and qualitative targets for basic income and food security for 1,500 families, improved health conditions, and strengthened management and preservation of remaining forest and other natural resources. Activities include provision of irrigation channels, household greenhouses growing   vegetables year round, cash crops, livestock, rural credit, solar water heaters and cookers, agricultural extension and agricultural and other vocational skills training for men and women. A main objective is to help all poor village families to increase their per capita family income above $1 per day after 5 years.