A Social Worker In Uganda: Demonstration Chicken Farm (2010)

In 2009 I began planning a project with the Serere Community Development Initiative (SECODEI) to establish a small chicken farm which would demonstrate best practice and sustainable farming methods. It was intended primarily as a template for women and girls to develop sustainable independent businesses.

Like others of my projects the farm would be based in Serere, a village in North-Eastern Uganda approximately 400km from the capital Kampala and with a population of 8000.

$2000AU donated by a generous family in Sydney, friends and relatives provided start-up money covering material and construction costs, the purchase & immunization of 10 hybrid (healthier and more productive) chickens as well as a wider immunization program for some 200 other chickens, ducks, geese & turkeys belonging to local villagers.

Those funds also afforded three practical seminars for community members on successful chicken farming and were given by a local agriculturalist (on top of the initial two given by myself and Dr Denis Omiat.)

DIARY OF THE CHICKEN PROJECT

In the first hour of each waking, Denis and I stand together in the cleared, swept compound space and discuss the plans for beginning the chicken farm project, later strolling across to the site and planning future needs of the birds and the community involvement.

By 10.30 on our first morning in Serere and after an eight hour bumpy car journey from Kampala, about seventeen women and three men have gathered in the 'teaching room' of the partially constructed health clinic that Denis and his wife Catherine are planning to open as the local medical centre and community resource. The group are seated on benches and folding chairs locally hewn from scraps of timber.

A quite long introduction lead in began with a summary to the group as to the purpose of the meeting, followed by prayers and two welcoming songs.The group settled to listen to my prepared talk about chicken farming. I explained that I was not a chicken farmer and all the information I would impart to them had been gained by me from extensive reading – of articles and blog sites I had accessed on the Internet and where possible, drawing on information from Ugandan and other east African country sites. For the next hour and a half, the community group listened with concentration, pausing me from time to time to ask questions.

The group was fully interactive, its members confident and sure of what they hoped for in outcome for this model chicken farm project. Potentially awkward questions about why it was to be built on the land of one person and how the rewards would be dispersed within the whole group, were openly discussed.

Community cohesion is much more apparent in rural communities in Uganda than evident in my everyday, more sophisticated Western society. The song and dance performed for my benefit on this occasion draws me in as the words inform me of what the community is giving to me and I am to receive from them: it is a kind of blessing song and the participants move gracefully and then as the tempo lifts, raise arms and swing their hips, a colourful medley of greens, yellow, reds and blues as the traditional dress of the older women swirls and eddies around them.

Following lunch, the meeting re-convenes and the local parliamentary member arrives on the back of a boda-boda, is introduced all round and gives his approval for the program, promising many financial incentives that none of us believe will materialise. It is when he has again left for some constituency meeting elsewhere, that the group returns to serious planning and time-tabling to ensure the project will be established within the space of 3 weeks.

An active community group member, Modesta, is appointed to be jointly responsible for the day to day running of the farm once the structure is completed and the birds installed: as she lives at some distance from Denis' compound, there is great applause when I announce that I will buy a bike for her daily use, but as an asset for SECODEI.

Our discussion has gone into a detailed account of the needs of the chickens and the likely cost for building the coop and ongoing specialist food for the birds, the deep litter that will be required for the nesting boxes. One man who has been attentive but quiet throughout, raises his hand and says that he will donate the litter as he is a carpenter and has access to wood shavings, a by-product of his work that he would normally sell.

The group claps its approval and then someone else, a forester, volunteers that he will donate a large tree to provide all the timber needed for the chicken coop.

Our first community meeting ends in the late afternoon as the shadows are beginning to lengthen: the group members are smiling, relaxed and evidently excited and happy at the venture about to begin. I am delighted with this beginning – after months of planning from twelve thousand miles away, it suddenly all seems to have come together and be a reality with real potential for the community to acquire new farming skills that could be duplicated not only in this village, but with local adaptation, throughout Uganda at relatively little cost and specifically for the benefit of women and girls.

Osama is to be the builder of our chicken coop: he has had the plans for several weeks now, purchased online by me and sent to Denis long before my arrival in the village. He is more familiar with building houses and the unfinished medical clinic is also his work, but this Western style chicken coop is a challenge to which he good-naturedly rises over coming days.

Before darkness has fallen on that first day, Osama has marked out the floor area for the coop and early the next morning I am woken to the steady sound of a hoe hitting the ground, turning and loosening the earth to establish the boundary for the foundation. (Osama proves to be very hard working for what seems pitifully small reward, plus the occasional flagon of the local brew, Waragi).

I keep detailed records of the project and book-keeping so that I can see at all stages, the exact cost of everything.

By the middle of the third week, I am pleased to note that we are within budget and will have sufficient money to conclude the project with purchase of the bicycle, and a mobile phone for Charles who will remain living in the compound after Denis has returned to university and Catherine, who has taken annual leave, to her clinical officer posting and rented accommodation in Serere town.

There is also money for purchase of the first 10 hybrid chickens that fully feathered and eighteen weeks of age, will be purchased in Kampala, transported to Serere and settled into their new home for four weeks before they begin to lay. Three months of food money and vaccine will also be left available to provide opportunity for the community group to decide how they are going to fund the ongoing project.

I know it'll be a success when I see the effort that everybody puts into the construction. It's back-breaking work, but men and women alike approach it with enthusiasm.

The area around the chicken coop has been completely cleared of weeds and planted with fast growing trees to provide shade: in the interim, the women have built a shade area in the local way – four upright poles and a thatch roof! Wire has been stretched and tightened to fencing poles and topped with barbed wire as added precaution against predators; the walls of the coop are completed and the pitched roof fixed; painting of the structure begins but is not completed until the day after I have left.

Locals comment that the chicken coop is grander than their own homes and I think to myself that if it fails as a chicken project, the coop at least will be put to good use! But, the project is not going to fail: there is too much determination in the group and already, discussion about how to adapt this coop and build cheaper, equally good housing and to expand the number of birds.

MORE PHOTOS FROM THE PROJECT