This paper investigates both community and household determinants of poverty among ethnic minorities in the Northwest region, Vietnam. Results of a fractional logit and a logit model show that some household factors such as fixed assets, education, land and off-farm employment have a reducing effect on both poverty intensity and incidence. Furthermore, some commune characteristics were found to be closely linked to poverty. Notably, the presence of means of transportation and post offices reduces both the poverty intensity and incidence. However, other commune and household factors affect only the poverty incidence or intensity, but not both. This suggests that previous studies that focused only on the determinants of poverty incidence using a logit/probit approach might not adequately evaluate or even ignored the impact of some factors on the poverty intensity. We draw both socio-economic household and commune level implications for poverty alleviation in the study area.