World Ark Magazine - March/April 2008 - (Page 28) Nine-year-old Chantal Batamuliza has just finished milking her family’s Friesian heifer in Nsinda village in Rwanda. The East African Dairy Development (EADD) project is working to ensure that women and girls have the opportunity to not only work in the dairies but to become community leaders. Before the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation grant, project participants may have received dairy cattle, goats, camels, bees, donkeys or fish. Projects typically incorporate gender equity and HIV/AIDS training, as well as leadership development and values-based planning for community development. The East Africa Dairy Development project focuses on dairy cows. No Access to Real Profit In eastern Africa, it’s almost impossible for subsistence-level farmers with little land and only a few cows to participate in the dairy industry or make real economic progress. Dairy cows there typically produce little milk. Even if a family’s cows could produce more milk than needed for household consumption, they would have to sell the excess immediately because of the lack of refrigeration for storage. So more than 90 percent of the milk in East Africa is sold at the farm gate or to peddlers who sell it at village markets or milk bars. But real profitability lies in becoming part of the commercial dairy industry producing consistently high-quality packaged milk products. Heifer’s EADD project solves this problem by placing refrigerated chilling plants at strategic locations where farmers can bring their milk for storage and pickup by commercial dairies. Then even a very poor farmer with a single cow can participate in the dairy industry. In addition to the chilling plants, the farmers need cows that produce higher quality milk. To improve cow breeds and production, the project will rely on artificial insemination using highquality bull semen to impregnate local cows. The resulting hybrid cows will inherit resistance to local diseases, while having greatly increased milk production. This is a twist on Heifer’s usual method of placing a pregnant dairy cow with a family. But since the cost of artificial insemination is only a few dollars, many more farmers will be able to participate. In this unique case, Heifer’s tradition of “passing on the gift” will mean that a participating farmer will pay for insemination services for another farmer’s livestock rather than passing along an actual animal. The farmers will receive training in Heifer’s small community groups. These groups will be consolidated into “dairy farmer business associations,” larger groups with thousands of farmers. There will be 30 farmer business associations, each owning and managing one of the chilling plants. A “Value Chain” of Profitability Chilling plants are the linchpin of the EADD project—the point where even a farmer with only one or two cows may join the profitable dairy industry. “This piece falls in line with our work with value chains,” said Kristin Grote, associate program officer in agricultural development at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Value chains refer to all the steps from producer to consumer in a single industry. In the dairy industry, this would include Heifer started working in Kenya in 1981, helping rural farmers develop sustainable agricultural enterprises in the Western, Nyanza, Coast, Rift Valley and Central provinces. Work in post-Amin Uganda began in 1982 through a request from the Church of Uganda. Heifer’s Rwanda projects were developed in 2000 through a $1 million grant from the U.S. Agency for International Development. 28 March/April 2008
For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.