Southwest China's Yunnan Province has relocated 1.5 million impoverished people to new houses, as of the end of 2020, local authorities said Wednesday.

Yunnan has lifted all the impoverished rural residents out of poverty and removed 8,502 villages from the poverty list as scheduled last year, Zhou Minxin, deputy director of the provincial development and reform commission, told a press briefing.

The province has allocated 33.37 billion yuan (about 5.16 billion U.S. dollars) of funds for poverty alleviation in areas such as employment, education, health and renovation of dilapidated rural houses, said Yang Kun, an official with the provincial department of finance, at the press briefing.

Funds and policies were inclined to promote the effective connection between poverty alleviation and rural revitalization, Yang added.

Yunnan will speed up the promotion of industries and collective economic assistance in poverty-stricken areas in 2021, Zhou said, adding that the province will also improve infrastructure and living conditions in rural areas.