Locals walk in front of a home in Jinzhu village of Jiangxi province March 21, 2007. [Reuters]

LIKE EATING CRAB

During a recent training session for the project held in Jiangxi, the NGO staff and local development officials were surprisingly open about their mutual strengths and weaknesses.

Zhang Zhihao, the effervescent head of Jiangxi's poverty alleviation office, said he was glad to implement a project that would help put into practice two of Beijing's priorities -- to modernize the bureaucracy and improve transparency.

"We're the first to eat the crab," Zhang said, using a Chinese saying to describe a pioneer.

Many of the participating NGOs said they saw the project as a way to raise their profiles while finding a steadier source of income than international aid money.

ADB's Spohr said the project could also be a model for local governments and civil society to provide other services like health care and basic education at the grassroots level -- something he said had been successful in countries from Bangladesh to South Korea.

"The ultimate beneficiaries are the poor villagers themselves," he said.

Huyan Qin, a project officer with an NGO, has noticed a difference in the attitudes of many of Jinzhu's residents over the past year or so.

When Huyan first went there to help Zhang Fengjiao and her neighbors work out how to spend their 500,000 yuan, many of them were skeptical whether a system for converting pig manure into cooking gas was worth the effort.

After visiting another village to see how it worked, they added it to their wish list, he said.

"Now they think more about how to change their lives."

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