Egg Laying Hens for Haitian Families

GreaterGood.org is celebrating 10 years of Giving Where it Matters! Help us meet our goal to increase the number of hardboiled eggs distributed to students at school per week by contributing to our Egg Laying Hens for Haitian Families Project. When you #Give10, you provide 1 hen and 3 years of eggs to Haitian students in desperate need of better nutrition. 

Nutritional Need Among Students in Haiti

According to a study we did with the students at our school, over 70% of students had someone in their household who felt hungry or who went without eating for the whole day because there was no food available.

Haiti is the poorest country in the Northern Hemisphere, with 2.5 million people living in extreme poverty (less than $1.25/day). Additionally 100,000 children under five years of age suffer from acute malnutrition, while one in three children are developmentally stunted, or irreversibly short for their age (World Food Program, 2015).

According to the World Bank, it is typical for Hatian families to spend up to 60% of their already meager income on the schooling of their children, paying for high tuition fees, textbooks and other scholastic materials (World Bank, 2014). With your help we can continue to support quality education, mitigate the financial burden on households, and improve child nutrition rates through this hen project. 

Milestones

• 379 hens distributed to 379 students. Thanks to you we met our initial goal of distributing 1 hen per student!
• 270 hens are kept at the school and provide 2.5 hardboiled eggs to 379 students per week 
• Hen care is incorporated into math & science curriculum for collecting, organizing and analyzing data into charts 
• Results of efforts to alleviate hunger through this program include an increase in energy, improved ability to focus at school and a decrease in headaches as reported amongs students

Individual Stories

Shoodlie
is 14 years old and is in the 8th grade at Matenwa Community Learning Center. She has attended school here since preschool and enjoys the school very much. When asked why, she said she enjoys school because the teachers teach them well and the school offers many interesting courses. "For example, the school gives us training on keeping hens and this training has given me the capacity to care for the hens in the chicken coops at the school. I now know how to feed and give vitamins to the hens so they can lay eggs. It makes me very happy when there are eggs for my classmates and I to eat. I also recently received a local hen from the school to take home. I am going to take good care of it so it can have chicks. When the chicks grow, I will sell them and use the money to do even greater things in the future.

Geralson & Jinelson 
two of the school's 8th graders willingly tool responsibility for the hens for two weeks when the director of the hen program took a two week leave. They took great care of the hens on school days as well as weekends, handling daily feeding and coop maintenance, including small repairs. They have shown how beneficial the hen program is for the secondary school students. Most of them are capable of managing a coop, especially after getting experience from the hens distributed this past year.

• Shoodlie (PDF)