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The Government of Lao PDR and Ethnic Minorities

Decent Essays

Since the end of the Cold War, the government of Lao PDR (GoL) promoted internal resettlement of indigenous ethnic minorities from remote highlands to lowland areas and along roads as an effort to make the delivery of government services such as health care and education more cost efficient. Though the government considers resettlement a voluntary choice on the part of the village, the government implements incentives for villages to resettle such as healthcare and disincentives for villages to remain in the highland such as destruction of agriculture as an attempt to encourage resettlement. But, internal resettlement had a devastating impact on the health of the relocated minorities and the healthcare promised by the government was inadequate and in some places nonexistent. To promote rural development, the Lao PDR government incentivized the resettlement of ethnic minorities from the mountainous highlands to the lowlands as a way of improving the minority’s access to health care, but suppressed immune systems suppressed from malnutrition and exposure to malaria ultimately increased mortality among those who resettled.
As a strategy for rural development, the government of Lao PDR encouraged the resettlement of villages with the idea that the resettlement would allow the government to provide services more cost effectively than traveling to the mountainous communities as had been done in the past. Post-Cold War, rural Lao PDR where the ethnic minorities resided was

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