Consultant at Heifer International Kenya

The project aims at increasing target farmer incomes to at least 1.5 USD/day by intervening in the following three enterprises:

• Indigenous Poultry: The project facilitated participating families to improve their chicken production management as well as explore marketing options for such chicken and their products.
• Savings and Internal Lending Communities: A key component of this project was to promote of Group Savings and Loan schemes within the groups.
• Sustainable Organic Agriculture: HIK-EPOG implemented Sustainable Organic Agriculture (SOA) with the 60 community groups including the 1,500 highly vulnerable families.
• Practical training in Sustainable Organic Agriculture (SOA) – Soil Conservation, Manure utilization in Composting, establishing Vegetable
  Gardens, simple Water Harvesting techniques and Home Hygiene will be emphasized.

Project Context

• Homabay County, the location in which the EPOG is being piloted, comprises smallholder subsistence farmers, facing structural and systematic challenges in livestock and crop production.
• They lack adequate knowledge on production, leading to low productivity and income, their soils are fertility depleted, further compounded by land degradation, pests/disease (particularly of maize), climate change (floods & drought) and poor-quality livestock breeds. Lack of livestock, quality farm inputs, or access to credit are great limiting factors.
• The project key interventions proposed building their capacity through training, to become more resilient and manage effectively the natural resources (land, soil, water, trees, and livestock) and climate change.
• The region has a high HIV prevalence (9-33%) compared to national rates (6.3%) and HIV/AIDS, coupled with high malnutrition rates contributing to vulnerability of families, particularly women headed households.
• The impact of poor health therefore, reduces farmers’ capacity to work their land, particularly as many are affected by HIV/AIDS epidemic. Farmer surveys found out people were eating < 2 meals a day and 96% had “not enough food” and experienced 6 months with food shortages a year.
• Farmers also reported income of < $1 a day with no viable alternative employment (SDG2) causing desperate survival and coping strategies including sale of assets, leasing out of land and begging for food and other non-food items.

Project Approach

The 2-year project was approved in March 2016 and targeted 60 self-help groups constituting 375 original families and 1125 pass on families emanating from the EPOG Process.

Similarly, the project is providing intensive training in: social capital development, improved poultry management and vegetable gardening. Other trainings offered include group management, record keeping, business skills and environmental care were incorporated in the project implementation.

The Key outcomes were:

• Incomes of participating farmers would have increased to USD 1.5 per day.
• Production of drought tolerant crops would increase by 30%.
• At least 5 clusters would have been formed

To achieve these milestones, the project was guided by the following key objectives

• Increase the incomes of participating famers to at least 1.5 USD per day: This was achieved through capacity building of groups and clusters formed by the groups in every sub county, improving access to credit, facilitating farmers to keep practice, poultry and agriculture as businesses and establishing private sector linkages.
• Increasing poultry productivity and agricultural production of drought tolerant crops by at least 30%: This was achieved through the strengthening of agricultural extension systems, supporting the adoption of improved agricultural practices in crop and vegetable production, establishment of animal health (especially poultry) delivery services and disease surveillance.
• Supporting the establishment of at least farmer clusters: Through Mobilization of the existing groups to form sub county clusters, Capacity building of the clusters to effectively market produce and Supporting linkages to financial institutions and markets.