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Are Chickens Really Answer to Poverty?

13 June 2016

Child carrying a chicken, Azamalan village, north Niger image

On 7 June, Bill Gates announced he would be partnering with Heifer International to donate more than 100,000 chickens to countries with high poverty levels. In a post on his website, Why I Would Raise Chickens, Gates wrote 'It’s pretty clear to me that just about anyone who's living in extreme poverty is better off if they have chickens', claiming that not only are chickens a good investment – a farmer starting with five hens could earn more than $1,000 a year – but that they also improve children's health and empower women.

However, in his book Chickens and Beer: A Recipe for Agricultural Growth in Mozambique, IKD member Joseph Hanlon investigated the role of chickens in a country in which fewer than 2% of farmers earn the figure suggested by Gates, and whose rural finance programme has, for more than a decade, allowed families to start raising chickens.

Although many of the families already had a few chickens and assumed, like Gates, that it would be relatively easy to expand into commercial production, most cases resulted in failure due to disease, parasites, feed costs and the high mortality of young chicks. In fact, the most successful form of family commercial chicken production was found to be outgrower systems – a company provides day-old chicks, feed, disease control and guarantees a market.

Now, however, even these successes are threatened as the Agriculture Fast Track Fund (set up by the US, Sweden and Denmark and run by the Africa Development Bank) has provided $550,000 to Odebrecht, the giant Brazilian construction company, to develop a project to produce one quarter of Mozambique's chickens. The project hopes to raise further money from the World Bank's International Finance Corporation and, if successful, will put out of business thousands of small producers.

You can find out more by reading Chickens and Beer: A Recipe for Agricultural Growth in Mozambique or Joe's Oxfam blogpost: Will Bill Gates' Chickens End African Poverty?

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