Empowering India's Rural Poor through Poultry

Dear Friends of Shivia,

We are always delighted to send you details of how our livelihood services programme is progressing, particularly when there is so much good news to tell you!

Here are some of the 'headline news' items we want to tell you about so you can see the impact your donation is making on the lives of very poor families in West Bengal:

• We are now operating our Poultry Development Services programme across four rural locations surrounding Kolkata, covering nearly 600 different village communities.  Since we launched the service in 2011, we have registered 5,766 home farmers and trained them in all aspects of poultry rearing.  

• On average, each farmer looks after a family of 5/6 dependents so the impact of our programme has extended to over 30,000 people!  And we train the whole family how to look after the chickens so everyone benefits from these newly acquired skills in poultry farming.

• In April 2015 we set a new record. Our Livelihood Services Providers - the field team who distribute the poultry toolkits and train our home farmers - delivered 930 toolkits in one month alone, helping us towards our target of 8,000 poultry toolkits delivered to home farmers in 2015.

• And this month we received more really positive news from our team in West Bengal.  Farmers from our Kanchrapara location have received orders for their chickens from commercial buyers in Kolkata - the latest order was for 500 chickens! They are being sold in supermarkets in the city - and of course they are naturally free-range, having been raised in our farmers' own backyards.  This is wonderful news for our farmers as they are able to charge higher prices than they do at the local markets, increasing the profitability of their small business enterprise (see photo below).

The best stories we hear are from the farmers themselves and so when the Shivia UK team visited West Bengal earlier this year, we took every opportunity to find out how the poultry programme is changing people's lives. Here are some of the things they told us:

"I am now able to afford the books and uniform to send my children to school".

"My son is very sick and now I can afford the medicines to look after him."

"I have started a new business with the profits from my poultry enterprise.  I now own a small 'hotel' (roadside cafe) in my village." (see photo below)

"My two sons are now helping me with the poultry and we have expanded to over 200 birds.  It's a real family business."

"I want to increase the size of my chicken coop and have laid the foundations for this already." (see photo below)

Click here to watch a short video we filmed while we were there, in which Chandrani Banerjee, Shivia's Head of Livelihood Programme, introduces us to Protima, one of our poultry home farmers, and tells us how she has used the profits from her enterprise to send her daughter to college.

Thank you for reading our latest report - we hope we have been able to show you the impact your donations are making to the lives of so many people in India.

We look forward to reporting more good news next time when we will tell you about our second livelihood enterprise - Agri-Management Services - in which we offer training and advice to our farmers to increase the crop yield and productivity of their small plots of land.

With thanks for your support from the team at Shivia

Shivia empowers the poorest to create livelihoods, boost income and inspire permanent change

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