YINCHUAN, Oct. 25 (Xinhua) -- Despite the three flights over about 18 hours that it takes to reach Yinchuan, the capital of northwest China's Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, Ayak Awer Chan Liol from South Sudan said the journey was well worth it.

"It's definitely eye-opening to come here," said Liol, a poverty eradication through economic development program officer in the Office of South Sudanese Vice President Benjamin Bol Mel. "It just gives an inspiration that if Ningxia can do it, Africa, South Sudan, specifically, can do it too."

Liol is one of 45 officials who have traveled from partner countries of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation and the African Union to attend a training program on China’s poverty alleviation and African development from October 19 to 26. The program includes lectures, field visits and teaching designed to offer insights into Ningxia's poverty-alleviation practices.

Ningxia was one of the main battlefields in China's poverty reduction efforts. Its Xihaigu region was once labeled the "most unfit place for human settlement" by visiting experts from the United Nations in the 1970s due to drought and a fragile ecological environment.

Thanks to continuous poverty-reduction efforts over the years, all 1,100 impoverished villages in Xihaigu had been lifted out of poverty by 2020, with 803,000 people shaking off poverty over the decade since 2011.

The participants visited Minning Town. The town's story began in 1996, when the Chinese government launched a pairing initiative, linking east China's Fujian Province with Ningxia to enable targeted poverty alleviation.

Over 60,000 people relocated from Xihaigu's arid mountains to new homes along the Yellow River, turning Minning into a thriving hub through agricultural and industrial growth backed by funding and expertise from eastern China.

At a government-supported e-commerce workshop, Liol said she had been amazed by the women there who were busy livestreaming, packing parcels and closing deals on computers, confident and proficient.

"I heard their stories. Some of them didn't know how to read and write. Some of them didn't finish school," she said. "But now they are standing in front of cameras and able to use computers, even just for copying and pasting. It's amazing and definitely something that inspires us to do something similar in our country."

Mphatso Richard Gama from Malawi was also greatly inspired. "It is 100 percent women employed. In Africa, women are usually taken as housewives, but you see in the workshop, they are generating income by doing markets and selling products," Gama said.

The group also visited a modern cattle farm in the town, which integrates breeding, forage cultivation, farmer training, and beef processing and sales.

Juma Omary Kapilima, head of the division of agriculture, livestock and fisheries of the Ulanga District Council in Tanzania's Morogoro Region, filmed what he was seeing on his phone and said he was eager to apply what he had learned.

Kapilima was impressed by the modern livestock farming and government support he observed. "There are also a lot of policies to support them, and they train farmers for free. This is meaningful and that's how the government helps local people to improve their income. Even in Tanzania, we can do so," he said.

Bame Thembi Golekanye from Botswana was deeply impressed by the town's mushroom greenhouse. Holding a cluster of its produce, she said she planned to introduce the fungus plantation system back at home.

"We don't have this at home. So I'm going to introduce it to the farmers on that side," Golekanye said.

The mushrooms are grown using Juncao technology developed in the 1980s by Lin Zhanxi at China's Fujian Agriculture and Forestry University.

The technology uses a type of hybrid grass to cultivate edible and medicinal mushrooms, while also functioning as animal feed and helping control soil erosion.

The grass has been adopted in over 100 countries, including over 40 in Africa, and is known as "Chinese grass" or "the grass of happiness" in these countries, according to Lin's student, Luo Zongzhi, who now leads a technical team in Minning Town.

In the nearby Juncao greenhouse, four-meter-tall grass remains lush green despite the chill of the late autumn. As one of its beneficiary countries, Malawi has long grown Juncao -- known locally as "elephant grass" -- to stabilize river banks, Gama told Xinhua. It is also used to feed animals like cattle, goats and sheep.

"The only thing different is that we are not yet using it to grow mushrooms," Gama said. "Maybe we should try this too to increase the mushroom production."

Gama cherishes this training opportunity, he said, and his notebook has been filled with observations and reflections from his trip to Minning Town.

"I think we should have hope. Nothing is impossible," Gama said.