Shivia's mission is to empower the poorest in India to create livelihoods, boost income and inspire permanent change. We do this by providing very poor families with the tools and training to work themselves out of poverty in a dignified way. Our two main programmes are Poultry Development Services (PDS) and Agri-management Services (AMS) which we have been running for over ten years. We have worked with thousands of families in West Bengal through both programmes. We set up the organisation, Nirdhan, in West Bengal in 2011 to deliver our operations and employ a local team to do so. More recently we have partnered with other NGOs to replicate our work in states beyond West Bengal such as Odisha so that our work can be scaled in a cost-effective and sustainable way.
PDS is our flagship programme which we launched in 2011 and is directly aligned to several of the Sustainable Development Goals with a particular focus on 5 and 8, gender equality and decent work and economic growth. PDS provides the tools and training – “the toolkit” – for families living in poverty, especially women, to start an enterprise from home by raising chickens and selling the produce. For the first two years, the families receive one to one support by our Livelihood Service Providers (LSPs) in what we term “the Individual Model”; farmers receive the toolkits to their doorstep and the LSPs provide the excellent service and handholding they need to have the confidence to start and run a backyard poultry enterprise. When they are ready, the LSPs help the farmers to form groups under what we term “the Group Model” so that over time they can procure the toolkit parts on their own and operate their poultry enterprises without our intervention. We introduced the Group Model in 2018. Our PDS Programme is delivered by a team of Five Field Supervisors and seventeen Livelihood Service Providers, thirteen of which operate the Group Model and four the Individual Model. Since 2011, we have distributed 110,992 toolkits to a total of 15,471 families across 1,385 villages of West Bengal. We were delighted that in July of this year, we distributed our one millionth chick!
Our superb training is reflected in the mortality rates of the chicks declining every year from 30% in our first year of operations to less than 2% consistently for the past five years. We train our farmers in how to build a coop relevant to their house and plot, how to vaccinate and medicate the chicks, how to feed the chicks cheaply but well and how to look after them especially given the dramatic changes in climate from the very hot summers to the cold winters and then the rainy monsoon season in between. We also train them in how to save, grow their enterprises or invest their additional income into other enterprises. As farmers transition into the Group Model, we train them in how to be part of a group, how to deal directly with suppliers, how to collect their toolkit parts from central points and how to grow their enterprises through, for example, building more permanent coops.
Graduating from the Group Model to independence has been our greatest success to date in Poultry Development Services. We are delighted that 1,348 of our farmers are now operating completely independently of us, sourcing the chicks, feed, vaccinations and medications on their own. Behind the scenes, we continue to check that the suppliers were providing the farmers with good quality chicks, on time and at the same competitive prices.
In the Individual Model, our farmers contribute the equivalent of £5 towards each toolkit whereby the actual cost is £15. This is the level they can afford or are able to find from family and friends rather than going to money lenders. Contributing towards the toolkits means they have a sense of ownership, turn up for training and look after their birds with pride. It also contributes to the financial sustainability of Shivia enabling us to distribute more toolkits.
Farmers typically take 15-20 toolkits per year for two years before we transition them into the Group Model to become poultry farmers, graduate them into our AMS or Goat-Farming Programmes or encourage them to start a second enterprise altogether. They are able to do all these things due to the combination of supplementary income from PDS, increased confidence and knowledge of how to do so. They see PDS as a “stepping stone” towards a brighter future. The majority of our farmers who start or expand second enterprises focus on grocery stores from their homes, helping their husbands with agri-related products or tailoring by buying a second-hand sewing machine or the materials to tailor clothes and items such as face masks. Other key areas of expenditure this year have been:
On top of the economic benefits, our impact data shows that 32% of our farmers choose to spend their additional funds from PDS on sending their children to school or keeping them there through private tuition. During a time where schools in India were largely closed for two years, we were heartened to see that many of the women used their income to top up mobile phones so their children could access home-learning; without our programme, thousands of children would simply have dropped out of school which would have dire consequences for their futures.
AMS is directly aligned to Sustainable Development Goal 2: End hunger, achieve food security, improve nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture and Goal 12: Responsible Production and Consumption. The programme helps poor families, who typically lease unproductive land that has been subject to overuse of chemicals, earn money from agriculture in an environmentally friendly, affordable and sustainable way.
AMS comprises a number of interlinked interventions: forming Farmer Interest Groups (FIGs) of 15 or so farmers; soil testing to ascertain the chemical imbalance and what is required to redress this; providing training and advice on affordable and environmentally-friendly farming techniques and products; helping the FIGs to open bank accounts; linking the FIGs to government programmes which farmers are unaware of or cannot do on their own and also linking them to suppliers of agri-inputs including bio-products. Even though the bio-pesticides and bio-fertilisers are largely made at home from cow dung, cow urine, jaggery, garlic, turmeric, oil cakes, neem leaves, akanda leaves (milkweed) and local grass, they still have to supplement them with bought products.
AMS now operates in four of our five locations in West Bengal and to date we have covered 276 villages. The Programme is carried out by a team of four Field Supervisors (also responsible for PDS), our specialist in agriculture and ten LSPs.
Each farmer contributes Rs. 100 or Rs. 200 (dependent on the location) on registration for the holistic service they then receive over the next two years when they can operate independently of us. This ensures they take the training seriously as well as helps with our own financial sustainability.
We started AMS in 2014 and have worked with 7,407 farmers in total.
The impact of AMS is staggering and has been particularly pertinent during the past two years of the Covid pandemic. Data shows that our farmers are making, on average, 40% additional income following our services, with input costs down by 15% and yields increased by 30%. Farmers have also changed, on average, to using 50% bio-products as opposed to 80% chemical products when we started. Much of the feedback is that families are able to stay together; by generating income from the land, the men do not have to migrate to the cities in search of work. Following lockdown, many men decided not to return to the cities as they saw profits in farming for the first time ever. The farmers are also delighted that once trained they are no longer reliant on Shivia and have obtained life-long skills.
Unlike in PDS where over 90% of our farmers are female, AMS is largely dominated by men, often our PDS farmers’ husbands. Whereas 32% of our PDS farmers spend their additional income on educating their children, not a single AMS farmer seems to do this; instead, 60% take more land on lease. The jump from them leasing two bighas (one bigha is c. 1/3 acre) of land when we started to between 3 - 6 bighas of land now has given our farmers real confidence that they can earn a living in the villages rather than migrating to the cities in the hope of finding some unskilled work and sending remittance home. They are also able to lease better quality land closer to home.
Through reporting and video footage from the field staff, we see endless examples of fields where the difference between using bio and chemical pesticides and fertilisers is stark. The team always emphasises how our impact is way beyond the 7,407 farmers we have registered and trained. “Seeing is believing” in the rural areas and thousands of farmers have started copying those on our programme by learning methods of planting seeds, bio-fertilisers, bio-pesticides and finding out about government schemes. This is leading to whole areas transforming their farming techniques.
Our results show that to date we have managed to :
We were particularly proud that in March 2022, one of our Agri-management Service Farmer groups at Sundia location received the first prize trophy for being the best group for practicing environmentally friendly farming techniques, using mostly bio inputs as fertilisers and pesticides, as well as earning significantly higher profits compared with other farmers in their area. These farmers received the prize from a government sponsored Television Channel. Further, in a Q&A session where farmers from other districts of Bengal participated, a team of Nirdhan’s farmers performed the best in demonstrating their AMS techniques and won another first prize accordingly. This independent recognition for our AMS techniques, training and impact was a great achievement for all in Shivia.
