By Victoria Denison | Executive Assistant, Shivia
We start our first report of 2017 by wishing all our supporters a happy, healthy and prosperous new year.
Of course, we wish the same for all our beneficiaries in West Bengal and, with your generous support, we know this is very achievable.
Shivia continues to work in the villages surrounding Kolkata where most families are living in poverty, classified by the World Bank as earning less than £1.50 a day. The reality is that many of the families we start helping have been living on less than that. When we meet them, they are often dependent on the income of one member of the household working as a casual agricultural labourer and earning as little as £215 a year. Even by standards in India, it is easy to see how people earning this little fail to cover even basic household expenses and, with lack of opportunities to earn money in other ways, the cycle of poverty is perpetuated.
We target families like this for our Poultry Development Services (PDS) programme and encourage the women in particular to take up the enterprise, as they are often the ones at home looking after the family and can most easily look after chickens too. In the majority of cases, this will be the first opportunity a woman has had to earn her own money.
Here’s a reminder of how raising chickens can raise money, and raise hope, for our beneficiaries.
It all starts with the £15 Shivia Poultry Toolkit:10 one-day-old chicks and the vaccines, medicines and feed needed to keep them healthy over the crucial first few weeks. Most importantly, the toolkit includes expert advice and training from our Livelihood Service Providers in all aspects of poultry rearing. We ask our farmers to make a contribution towards the cost of the toolkit – this is about £5 (based on today’s exchange rate) and ensures that farmers value our services and take ownership of their enterprise from the very beginning and in the long term. So the actual cost to Shivia to supply one toolkit in India is just £10…..keep that figure in mind.
We encourage our farmers to keep their hens for egg laying as this can raise the most income over a year. The hens we supply lay about 150 eggs a year - our most popular breed is the Kuroiler, a hardy bird that thrives off household scraps and agricultural waste and is a highly productive layer. Eggs sell at the local market for 5 rupees each. If our farmer keeps at least five hens from her first toolkit for egg production, she can earn about £45 a year. Many farmers decide to sell one or two of the birds, usually the cockerels, for meat when they need a quick cash boost. A mature 2kgs bird will fetch about £3 at market.
Our research shows that new farmers make a net profit from each toolkit of around £40 per year for 2/3 years. From our original net cost of £10 per toolkit, that’s a pretty impressive return on the investment! Many of our more established farmers are making much more than that as the reinvest money back into building their poultry farming enterprise.
Take for example Sabera who I met on a visit to West Bengal last year. Sabera registered with Shivia for PDS in 2013 after her husband died from a stroke, leaving her with no means of an income. Over the next three years she bought eight of our subsidised toolkits, spending £40 in developing her poultry enterprise. She also spent about £60 on building a large chicken coop and buying extra feed for her hens, although she feeds them well on household scraps too.
Sabera decided to concentrate her business on breeding birds and selling eggs at the local markets and when we met in 2016, she had 50 hens of egg-laying age. We calculated that her income, net of expenses, over three years had been at least £1,300. She used some of this money to start a second enterprise and now runs a small roadside café selling tea and, guess what? Omelettes!
As a single parent looking after a growing family Sabera feels very proud of her acheivements and has been empowered by her success. Not surprisingly, she is Shivia's greatest advocate in her local village and a wonderful role model for other women there.
Sabera’s story is unusual but not exceptional. We have worked with over 8,300 families over the last 5 years and have witnessed many examples of hard work, enterprise and entrepreneurship like this.
We hope you continue to support Shivia in 2017 and help us to help many more women like Sabera work their way out of poverty for good. It can all start with just one of our poultry toolkits…..
With best wishes from the Shivia team.
By Victoria Denison | Executive Assistant, Shivia
By Victoria Denison | Executive Assistant, Shivia
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