Women Economic Empowerment: Snail Farm in Ghana

Dear all,

OnbehalfofAfricaYouthforPeaceandDevelopment, we want to thank you for your support our Economic empowerment of rural women: Snailproject. With your donations, we were able

to do many things that are geared towards realizing the goal of the project below you will see

the various activities

Wearegladtoannouncethatour six women have been able to undergo training for a period of 6 months and have been able to learn so much. The Training Range from Farm management, Snail Farming, Business Management and also Fieldwork. Some of the training was conducted by AYPAD Staff Nuria Badiella and Philip Salis Bangura while also the organization had a volunteer from Italy by the name of Sofia melisi from Universitat Bocconi. The women had to come to the farm on a daily basis for 2 hours a day for Training and one 1 for taking care of the snails.

After the completion of the Training, the six women have also been busy taking care of the snail. We can now say since we commenced we have about 400 matured snails and about 1200 baby snails. We have about 2000+ eggs that are being cared for on a daily basis.

Some of the matured snails were sold to upkeep the farm while also helping in paying for some of the work in the farm.

Our next step

• Provide women with startup kits for them to start their own snail farm. This kit will include snail pen for each woman, 100 snails, watering can and all necessary equipment’s for them to start their mini farm and also be able to supply the organization client based.

• We plan to find new customers while we are closely working to take care of the young snail babies and also the eggs for us to have a huge amount that will be able to reach our client demand. We plan to also raise fund to be able to secure a land big enough to have more snail pens and be able to employ more women

• Report3 (PDF)
  

Dear Team,

The second quarter of the snail farm project is getting really interesting. We bought 480 snails, although is not recommended to buy the snails from the market – because they are in stressful conditions - we coordinated with a snail market seller to bring us fresh snails straight from the farm. We have been able to keep these snails during the rainy season. We also saw many eggs at some point but due to the heavy downpour of the rain – which still enters the pen in some areas – the eggs could not hatch properly. From the ones that hatched only 24 snails survived. The adult snails also suffered, 63 adults died on the journey, which we attribute to the same water problem, falling down from a distance and stress due to environmental change. As of today, 21^st September 2018, we have 441 snails, and many eggs which we hope will hatch.

In September, the participants started training in business management, marketing techniques, and snail biology. Through the partnership with “Universitá Bocconi” from Milano, Italy, our intern Sofia Milesi is training the six participants from Monday to Friday on how to be good managers and market their product well. Also, Núria, the Farm Leader, has also started teaching the women on snail biology each Sunday.  It has not been easy for the women, their main challenge is the language barrier between them and the instructors – but surely they are having fun doing their best to speak “broken English”, Eunice says.

After the Sunday lecture on African snail’s biology, we hold a weekly meeting with the participants’ full team. The meeting aim is to create a cooperative environment within all the participants and ensure the success of our farm. Therefore, we discuss issues that arise during the week, update members on activities done or to come, revise our schedule, plan resources needed for the following week, and any other topics that are brought up.

It has not been easy to start, but we know that we are slowly increasing our capacity and skills, and this will lead us to the success. The steps planned for next quarter are:

- To reduce mortality of the snails: ensuring that the water does not penetrate in the snail pen and the snails do not fall down;

- To reduce the language barrier: inviting a twi-english translator as a temporal measure and teach English to participants.

We believe that the above measures will improve the current situation and simplify our work on the project.

We would like to give all of you another big thank you and encourage you to keep supporting us in all you can. We hope soon the participants will be Super-Snail-Women and with your continued support, they will be starting their own snail farms.