By Victoria Denison | UK Operations Manager
Empowering women to earn
We know that the impact of PDS is enormous for incredibly poor women. Our impact studies show that our women farmers can earn an additional 30% household income annually from the sale of chickens and eggs. And we know that when a woman earns money she will spend it on her family first and foremost.
When we questioned our farmers about what their spending priorities were, education was high up on the list for most mothers. Just being able to buy uniform and books allowed their children to attend school regularly. Also, a few hundred extra rupees a month (£3 or £4) pays for some additional tuition so that their children pass the exams they need to stay in school and move up to the next class. This is such a high aspiration given most of our PDS farmers are uneducated or illiterate themselves and they strive towards providing brighter futures for their own children.
Over half the women we talked to said they have used their money to start a second enterprise, which accelerates their route to independence and a more financially secure future. Typical examples include running a small grocery shop from home or a tailoring business having bought a second-hand sewing machine.
Promoting independence and entrepreneurship
Our goal is to give women the tools and training to work their own way out of poverty and remain that way, without falling back into the poverty trap once we are no longer helping them. The key to this is independence - being able to sustain a profitable poultry farming enterprise in the long term without our intervention. We have been working hard researching how to achieve this and in July 2018 we launched a new extension to our PDS programme - 'PDS Groups'. When a woman enrols on our poultry farming programme we will work with her on an individual basis for two years, with intensive training, hand-holding and confidence-building. Thereafter, she will graduate into a farmer group. By working in groups, women can source the toolkit parts on their own (the chicks, vaccinations and feed, etc.) and sell their produce further afield without the need for our assistance. We are delighted to report that over 580 farmers are now members of a group and are using the training and resources we have given them to truly launch out on their own to become fully fledged (excuse the pun) poultry farmers, independent of our charitable services.
Thank you for helping us to create these opportunities for thousands of women who are determined to provide a brighter future for their families.
UN Sustainable Development Goals
We are proud that our programmes are aligned to a number of the UN SDGs, in particular:
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