How Climate-Resilient Chickens Could Help Fight Poverty

“How old do you think these chickens have?” Levy Phiri asked the crowd, after collecting four multicolored birds from a cash and put them in the courtyard outside the Kambvumbe elementary school, a village in the Rural Province of Zambia.

The approximately 200 people who came out in the mid -afternoon heat for this presentation held by the largest chicken nursery and transformer of the country have put around the neck for a better appearance.

A year, someone called. Fourteen months, another suggested.

Mr. Phiri, representative on the field for the company, the hybrid poultry farm, stopped a moment for suspense. For only six weeks, he revealed. Discreamed surprise through the gathering.

These are not just hens. They are Zambro chickens, birds raised specifically to thrive in the most difficult climates. A Double use chicken – More information on this – which needs less water and feed, grows faster and more fat and lays more eggs. A chicken more resistant to disease and costs less to collect than many of the chickens of the village found in the courtyard.

Such chicken is important in countries such as Zambia, which is increasingly affected by an extreme climate. Last season, the worst drought in four decades devastated crops and cattle. The lack of food in rural areas spread to a country that already had one of the higher rates of malnutrition and stunted children in sub-Saharan Africa.

“How many people have eaten an egg on the last day?” Mr. Phiri asked the crowd at the Kambvumbe school. In the last week? The last two weeks? Finally a person raised a hand.

The Zambro initiative is sponsored by a partnership between Hybrid, based in Lusaka, And the World Polytry Foundation, a non -profit organization in Atlanta that received funding from the Gates Foundation and the Qatar Fund for Development. The companies they are supporting are not beneficial organizations, but private initiatives that depend on transforming a profit.

“It is essential that it is a practicable activity,” said Maureen Stickel, director of the international development of the poultry at the Foundation. “We never give chickens.”

The importance of self -sufficient programs in Zambia and in other poor countries is more urgent now that President Trump has brought a saw to the American foreign help programs. For years, Sub-Saharan Africa He was a main recipient of the American aid. Last year, the Region received $ 12.7 billion. More billions have been spent in other world programs relating to health and climatic resilience that have also largely benefited from Africa.

Great Britain is also cutting foreign assistance to finance increases in his military expenditure.

Double use races began to spread to Africa in mid -2010. There were Noilers in Nigeria, Tanbros In Tanzania, Kenbros in Kenya. The World Poultry Foundation has started to help Distribute these breeds In 2016.

Hybrid was united once with another non -profit organization that gave chickens to farmers. But when the loans are over, the project also said Simon Wilde, CEO of Hybrid. “Anyone can enter and launch it,” he explained. You have to teach farmers, he said: do this, not that, and that’s how you make money.

The World Polytry Foundation has developed a business model that can be practicable for poor farmers in places with little electricity, internal hydraulic systems or access to transport. The organization therefore provides early funding for a maximum of five years to help make a small chicken activity take off.

“When they start making profits, we move to the background,” he said Randall Ennis, CEO of the Poultry Foundation.

So far the Foundation has contributed to successful companies in Nigeria, Tanzania, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Gambia, Sierra Leone, Senegal and Madagascar, helping about 2.7 million families, said Ennis. Business models similar in support of double use chickens can be found throughout the continent.

“There is no doubt in my mind that this is an absolutely transformative program for these rural sectors,” said Ennis.

The Foundation is trying to expand on other continents. The eighty percent of people who live in rural areas all over the world breed chickens in the courtyard; Most of them are women.

If you are used to the purchase of your pinched and wrapped plastic chicken, the idea of ​​a double use chicken can be a source of confusion. In the world of commercial poultry, chickens are essentially grouped in one of the two categories: layers and chickens of meat. Chickens that reliably produce an egg every day or they are quickly to be eaten.

A chicken that can be used to lay both eggs e Being eaten can be a kind of wonder. Especially when the same bird consumes less water and integrates its diet to forage for termites and grasshoppers.

However, ensuring that subsistence farmers take a risk and invests their poor savings in a new race and the development of a new market requires awareness, training and marketing services.

Hybrid has learned in the hardest way. Before his partnership with the Foundation, he tried to market a double use bird other than Zambro. That breed had brown feathers, which made it seem like a chicken of the local village that no longer produced eggs. Buyers were confused.

The failure underlined the need for representatives of the field to work closely with the bins, which raise the chicks for the first four weeks, as well as the small scale manufacturers, who buy the birds of a month and then sell chickens, their eggs or both.

Elisha Zakoka, a representative on the field in the Rufunsa district, visit each customer once a week and call twice a week for check -in. If there are problems, it arrives more often.

“He started leading me,” said Phidelis Kayaya, a Broother who started collecting Zambros last year. Mr. Zakoka taught him, for example, how to vaccinate the chicks. He explained why the power supplies should be positioned at the top of bricks, so the chickens must not bend the neck to eat, which compromises chewing and digestion.

Mr. Kayaya had previously bred the chickens of meat. “They eat too much and are subject to diseases,” he said, explaining why it has changed. The need for Zambros of less water also makes the difference. Every day, Mr. Kayaya has to walk a third of a mile to a hand pump, fill a large metal drum and then roll him home so that his family can have water.

Mr. Kayaya had recently bought 1,000 Zambro chicks and had started selling door to door. With a motorized three -wheeled vehicle, it could offer a free delivery: a large strength in a large rural area where paved roads are an anomaly and the cars are scarce.

At four weeks, however, he was able to sell only 700 of the flock. So he waited a few more weeks because the remaining became fat enough to sell as grids. In the meantime, with eggs, Kayaya said, his family ate better.

Mr. Zakoka, the representative of the field, observed that the chickens were underweight. Mr. Kayaya nodded. He said he had cut their daily feed because he couldn’t afford more. Last year drought swept away the crops and pushed most of the region’s farmers on the edge. A national team debt crisis Added strain. Medicine and animal feed are expensive or impossible to find.

This year’s prospects were much better: the rains had arrived and everyone was optimistic on the April harvest.

In Petauke, Vincent Musonda’s three weeks chicks were at the height of health. The Musard Mr. used to lift the chickens of meat, but said that the mortality rate was sometimes up to 15 percent. Of the 255 Zambros with which he began, only one was dead, and it was then that a suspended power supply fell on it.

Wilde, Hybrid CEO, admitted that the drought had slowed down the beginning of the pilot program. But it was confident that with this harvest, sales would increase.

In Zambia, Hybrid now plans to expand the program in another province to the north.

Farmers like Mr. Kayaya have heard of Zambros of the big billboards hybrids erected out of the village markets, social media, from WhatsApp groups and radio advertising, field representatives and introductory marketing meetings such as the one held at the Kambvumbe elementary school near Petauke.

Initially only a handful of people had gathered for the meeting last month at school. But the arrival of two new and large cars that bounce on the dirt road, transporting the hybrid team, has attracted looks and chatter excited by passers -by and students who return home. So Hybrid started distributing Audace Royal Blue Kivenge, the envelope of the classic woman, with the company logo showing bright yellow and white hens.

The husbands called their wives and women called their neighbors: come quickly. There is Swag.

In the end, about 200 people showed up for what turned out to be a mix between a awakening of the tent, a “Wolf of Wall Street” marketing field and a Tupperware party. There was an opening prayer, some jokes, testimonies and lemon biscuits. There have been promises that the Zambros would eventually have extra money, envious neighbors and children at the best.

At the end of the meeting, two dozens of people had enrolled to buy chickens, hoping that all those promises would come true.