HANGZHOU -- China's e-commerce giant Alibaba launched on Wednesday the Poverty Relief Spring Thunder Initiative dedicated to combating poverty in the country's rural areas.

Under the initiative, 100 "Village Livestreaming Colleges" will be established to cultivate 100,000 farmer livestreamers, and digital agricultural bases and 50 brands featuring agricultural products will be built. The project will also build 100 "deliveryman villages" to provide more than 100,000 new jobs in poverty-stricken counties.

Alibaba will dispatch senior staff to impoverished counties and help the poor to cast off poverty by developing e-commerce and other industries based on the local conditions.

In recent years, Alibaba has been working on rural e-commerce in China. In 2019, a total of 832 poor counties sold agricultural products via Alibaba's e-commerce platform, with the sales volume reaching 97.4 billion yuan (about $13.7 billion). Alibaba's "Village Broadcasting Plan" also held a total of more than 1.6 million livestreaming sessions last year, covering about 2,200 county-level regions nationwide.

In December 2017, the company set up a poverty relief fund of 10 billion yuan to promote prosperity in China's rural areas, focusing on programs such as health, education, women's empowerment, e-commerce and environmental protection.