Grants

The two days have been a crash course in grants. Yesterday we went to a meeting where the people from Microprojects (part of the Swazi government) explained two grants cosponsored by the European Union. I think it would be fair to say there was good deal of confusion. Let me see if I can lay it out properly.

We arrived having read the grant notices. We were familiar with the format and the goals, so we were thinking about our approach, and how we were going to structure our proposal. When we arrived, the people from Microprojects tried to lay out the main aspects of the grants. In doing so, however, they focused pretty heavily on small-scale irrigation projects. This surprised us, because there wasn't much in the notice about irrigation, certainly no more than any other type of agriculture. This was pretty concerning to us, because we are in poultry production.

Of course Tinashe always has about 12 ideas swirling around in his head, and so he immediately started thinking about the kinds of things we could do if the grant was only for irrigation. He'd seen a very impressive small business model in Kenya at the Partners conference, so he started thinking about how we could do that, even using the nitrogen-rich chicken manure for fertilizer.

Anyway, today we went to meet with the administrators in a more private setting. We explained to them the kind of business we have, and why we like the model so much. We explained that our model is very sustainable; it's practically ad infinitum once we get the money to start (about $3,000 per farmer). We also explained that we already have a contract with a slaughterhouse who will purchase the chicken from our farmers. The man we talked to was very excited about the kinds of stuff we do, and he's going to email the EU contact to see how best to fit it into the grant proposal. He admitted that they had as much information as we did, and that they were still learning how all this works. So I'm very optimistic about working with them to get some grant money and expanding our operation. Currently, we have a group 11 chicken farmers going with 7 cycles per year (that's full capacity). We also have another 14 houses in another group. The houses are built, but we're still trying to scrounge up the money (that's the $3,000 per house) for the inputs (chicks and feed).

Now Tinashe is also thinking about how we can do this crop thing from Kenya as well, so I'm looking into that a bit. There's a lot going on here, and it's exciting to be getting into some of it.

-Ben