Moving up the pecking order

Scrawny, long-legged, village chickens have long caught the attention of development agencies, even if the birds themselves are hard to catch. The reasons are obvious. It takes very little extra effort to push up production from such birds and the benefits go straight into the hands of women who, generally, own and look after village poultry. The challenge has been to find the most effective way of introducing improvements in productivity. Bangladesh seems to have the answer thanks to a project which has introduced a more professional attitude to rearing chickens to many hundreds of thousands of rural women.

More than 80% of rural households in Bangladesh raise poultry in a low-input, low-output system. Even though many people own no more than half a dozen chickens, and few own more than twenty, the birds get little attention and almost no supplementary feeding. Birds scavenge freely during the day, picking up rice husk, insects etc. and may be penned at night. Productivity is very low compared to high-input systems; disease is common and very destructive but, while local birds could never match the egg-laying capacity of exotic breeds, they do have the potential to produce more if fed and looked after better.

In the past, poultry improvement projects tended to concentrate on vaccination and breeding programmes implemented through the government extension services. More recently the trend has been to work with local village groups and NGOs. One such project, established in 1993 with a grant from DANIDA, a loan from IFAD and technical assistance from DARUDEC, (Danish Rural Development Consultants) was so successful that it led to a second, the Participatory Livestock Development Project, this time with a loan from the Asian Development Bank. A third project is soon to start. Many hundreds of thousands of poor, rural households are now benefiting from the improved diet and better cash income that a small poultry business brings.

In the villages it seems that everyone is involved. Some women run hatcheries, others raise young chicks to 8 weeks. The majority grow birds from 8 weeks into lay and a few are involved in selling eggs and selling feed. Village chickens normally eat 100g food a day, half of which is supplied through supplementary feeding and the balance by chickens scavenging in the household environment. Vaccination against Newcastle Disease is a pre-condition of the $40 start-up loan offered on the Grameen Bank model of micro credit. The loan repayment rate is very high at 95% to 98% and, although Bangladesh is perhaps exceptional in its tradition of successful micro credit, the Participatory Livestock Development Project has proved so effective that DANIDA is considering how it could be modified for application elsewhere.

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