E-commerce training equips farmers with new life skills

Subsidized training encourages participation

For the past two years, since 2014, Sihong County has been hosting an evening class every Saturday. It is always full, with nearly 100 attendees—all farmers from nearby townships and villages—each week, listening intently and scribbling notes.

In fact, Sihong County hosts for surrounding townships and villages a number of other similar, weekly training events, all of which are paid for by the local government. Studies showed that in the first half of 2016, e-commerce training in Sihong was provided to a total of 11,600 individuals.

The county has also introduced certified-professional training institutions to teach e-commerce to its farmers, providing subsidies of RMB 400, 600, or 800 per person depending on the level of the class attended.

After acquiring the newly taught skills and successfully completing their courses, residents went on to launch their business in the e-commerce incubator jointly founded by the county, the township, and the village. At the county level, an industrial park—covering about 33,000 m2 of an over-80,000 m2 lot—was built to lead e-commerce business development in the region and to encourage cluster development. Serving as a hub for production, sales, storage, logistics, and training, as well as an experimental e-commerce business zone in the county, the industrial park attracted nearly 100 e-commerce businesses as soon as it opened its doors. At the township and village levels, many e-commerce businesses were incubated successfully. Taobao launched an in-depth cooperative effort with the villagers and built 120 Rural Taobao service stations, promoting the inflow of online goods to rural areas and the outflow of agricultural products to urban centers.

Multiple incentives encourage e-commerce entrepreneurship 　

Sihong introduced a number of incentives to encourage its farmers to engage in e-commerce businesses, providing incubators with subsidization totaling as much as RMB 100,000 in a single installment. In order to encourage the sale of agricultural products, the county also subsidizes 10 model Rural Taobao shops every year, granting them RMB 10,000 each. The top 10 service stations based on annual performance are subsidized RMB 10,000 each; the top 10 online enterprises of that year are subsidized RMB 50,000 each; and R&D e-commerce projects holding intellectual property rights are subsidized a maximum of RMB 1 million. In addition, even micro e-commerce businesses with over 5,000 annual deliveries in the sale of local agricultural products are subsidized RMB 0.5 per delivery.

Sihong has encouraged the development of its logistics industry by providing categorized incentives: For companies that reached for the first time 1 million and 2 million annual delivery orders for the first time, the county provided them with subsidies of RMB 50,000 and 100,000, respectively. So far, more than 500 logistics companies have been established in the county.

Thanks to government support and policies, there are currently over 7,500 e-commerce businesses running in Sihong. More than 6,000 of the owners were farmers at one point.

But the biggest winners in Sihong’s developmental achievement are the farmers themselves. Take for example Cui Jinchuan, from the town of Jieji: The farmer-turned-delivery-worker is now able to make RMB 4,000 a month sorting deliveries. Now more than 35,000 such e-commerce-related jobs have been created in the county, and their average annual income has reached RMB 20,000. To this day, a total of 41,000 farmers from Sihong have benefited from the e-commerce industry.