Empowering India's Rural Poor through Poultry

Thank you all so much for your amazing support of Shivia during the Gateway Challenge. We won both categories – the highest number of donors and the highest amount of donations.   Our biggest achievement is the impact the programme is having on the lives of the home-farmers and the life-changing stories they are telling our team. You are a part of this! Women are paying back microfinance loans from the profits of their toolkits, attitudes from the male members of the family are changing – supporting their sister/mother/wife in their enterprise or school work or studies – previously women were often not entitled to an education and work support was rarely given. Many are saving in common funds to dig tube-wells in the villages or even constructing toilets. Some parents have bought second-hand bicycles for their children to go to school with instead of taking buses, saving money. The biggest benefit is their ability to send children to school by buying books and uniforms - their biggest desire – and which we have now made possible. Almost all women have adopted the regular practice of saving, which is a very positive impact of the whole programme.

One such case study is Mina, aged 38, a housewife from the lowest caste who started poultry farming in 2013. She and her family migrated to Bengal from Bihar, a neighbouring state, 10 years ago because they had lost everything in their own state due to severe drought. Since then she has survived on almost nothing. The government of Bengal gave 1,080 sq.ft of land to every family who migrated and settled in the remote interior villages of 24 Parganas North tribal area where we work. She has two children, two parents and an ill husband; they had no money for any medical treatment.

After significantly increasing her household income through the poultry farming, she bought a pair of six week old goats from the market with partial financial help from her mother. Now, she has three kids from the goats and she survives on the chickens as well as goat milk. She plans to sell the goat kids for meat in 3-4 months’ time, during the puja festival and keep the female goat for further breeding. Her children had to repeat school classes for three years due to lack of money for new class admission, books, uniform etc. Now she has managed to put them in the next class and is very happy with her progress out of extreme poverty.

Since we completed the Gateway Challenge on 5th June, we have, in total, distributed 413 toolkits to 219 home-farmers, indirectly impacting the lives of 1,200 people.  We plan to distribute a further 1,400 toolkits in the next three months.

Thank you so much for your donations and support as well as your belief in our project – this is incredibly motivating to our team on the ground in India

Links:

• Thank you to our Global Giving donors from our home-farmers