Company’s program helps people in countryside to access goods, services

Almost half of China’s 1.3 billion population still live in rural areas. While incomes are growing, some rural residents still lack the employment opportunities and everyday products and services that city dwellers take for granted.

That is what Alibaba Group Holdings Ltd sees as a huge unmet need. Through an initiative called the Rural Taobao program, the e-commerce titan is helping to raise living standards in China’s countryside by providing e-commerce access to millions of the nations’ poorer residents. Taobao is the customer-to-customer online marketplace owned by Alibaba.

With an estimated investment of $1.6 billion since 2014, the company has established thousands of Taobao Rural Service Centers across China, enabling villagers with little or no access to the internet to order and receive goods which so far have been inaccessible to them.

Gong Jianfei, who runs one such service center in Lin’an county in Zhejiang province, is helping local villagers source needed items online with better quality and lower prices. She places 40 to 50 orders a day on behalf of the buyers and asks them to collect when the parcels arrived at the center in a couple of days.

Gong said: “E-commerce is helping them join the digital economy, and some of them even start their own businesses online.”

The program has gone into partnership with local governments to provide free access to computers. Alibaba also offers training to villagers on internet searches and the completion of online payments.

According to company data,

E-commerce is helping them join the digital economy, and some of them even start their own businesses online.” Gong Jianfei, who runs a Taobao Rural Service Center in Lin’an county, Zhejiang province

the top-three best-selling items sold through the service centers are home appliances, mobile top-ups and women’s clothing.

By June 2016, the gross merchandise value of e-commerce in rural China reached 316 billion yuan ($46 billion), accounting for nearly 15 percent of all e-commerce trans-