Step 1: We locate a target group. We were aided by Advocates for Africa's Children. They gave us two groups of women (11 & 14 women in each group) who are taking care of their families and a few orphans each in the community. These women are all rural villagers.
Step 2: After some basic training in the classroom and helping them form an organization, we do hands-on training on how to build a chicken house. We start with the first one and train there, but each woman eventually gets her own chicken house. These aren't cheap, and they make payments over their first three years to pay them back. They are not handouts.
Step 3: Once a farmer has her chicken house and she has been through a few training cycles at the training chicken house, she gets 1,000 chicks. We pay National Chicks about $3,000 to provide 1,000 chicks, vaccinations, medications, and coal for the furnace.
Step 4: The women work hard to raise their chickens. There is a surprisingly complex system of feeding, watering, heating, ventilating, and lighting that needs to be adjusted so it's just right and checked frequently to make sure it stays that way (I had just assumed you spread some feed and make sure the water troughs are full). During this process, Pastor Daniel works with them, giving them weekly reports and answering questions and concerns. He is paid by the farmers at a rate of E0.50 for each chicken brought to the processing plant (This comes to roughly $66 per farmer per cycle on a good day).
Step 5: After about 5 weeks, Pastor Daniel brings the chickens to the processing plant. They are dressed, weighed, and sold to the plant for E19.00/kg (dressed weight). On a good day, the average chicken weights about 1.4 kg and 940+ chickens will be processed. From the final total, AfricaWorks is paid back for the inputs (loan + 3.5% per month), they make a payment on their chicken house, and they keep the balance (anywhere up to $350 or so).
Some challenges that we've run into:
1. The farmers saw no need to hire Pastor Daniel. We convinced them otherwise by showing them they had no way to get the chickens to the processing plant and had very little working knowledge of chicken farming. And we explained to them that we do not exist to give them free goods and services (which is what makes this model unique).
2. Ownership. One of our main goals is to have our farmers recognize their ownership in their farms. This can be seen by the cold snap I mentioned when I arrived. A few of the farmers ran out of heating coal. Most of them simply looked on helplessly while their mortality rates rose, but one woman simply collected firewood and kept her furnace going. That's not the action of an employee, that's the action of a business owner. We're trying to get all of our farmers to think that way.
3. Losses. Some of our farmers haven't gotten very good at this yet. We had two farmers who went to the processing plant last week. Their average weights were around 1.2 and their mortality rates were high. As a result, they ended up posting a loss after everything. Because the entire association (all 11 farmers) guarantee each other, that meant that the association had to cover for them and pay back AfricaWorks for the loan. The association executive committee came to us and wanted us to ask those farmers for reports of what went wrong. We had to explain that the loss was something they needed to work out between themselves and their employee (Pastor Daniel). While we provide training through Pastor Daniel, we're trying to help them understand that they are a business and they need to take responsibility for each other and demand accountability from each other rather than us keeping them in line.
Benefits:
1. Some of the farmers are really getting it. They've been reducing mortality and increasing rates and have seen their profits drastically increase because of it.
2. Sustainability. Once we get the $3000 per farmer for inputs, that money continuously cycles over and over and over, endlessly. AfricaWorks operating costs (both salaried employees) come out of the financing fees (that 3.5%), meaning that both AfricaWorks and the farmers will keep on going no matter what donors do. We are, however, dependent on donors to increase the number of farmers that we can help. Right now, we have our group of 11 farmers going full time (7 cycles per year). Our group of 14 farmers has their chicken houses constructed, but we don't have the $3,000 per farmer to start them raising chickens. That's why we're going after this EU grant.
I hope that helps you understand what we're doing here. It's an exciting model and I'm proud to be working on it.
-Ben
Thanks, Ben. It's interesting to read of some of the nuts and bolts of your work there. Keep it up! -Herm
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