Lam Dong’s Forest Protection and Development Fund (FPDF) manages one of the largest provincial
funds in the country. Annually, the payment for Lam Dong forest owners is about 8.7 million USD
for 16,000 contracted households, of which nearly 80% are ethnic minority people. In the past, most of these payments were made by cash – creating a huge workload, and a risky and time-consuming process to physically disburse the payments in cash.