US foundation works to end African poverty with chickens.

The World Poultry Foundation (WPF) take a $21.4 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and, in four years, wants to improve incomes and nutrition for millions of smallholder chicken farmers in rural Africa. The team leading the World Poultry Foundation is working in rural Nigeria and Tanzania to empower smallholder farmers – especially women – to earn higher incomes and improve the nutrition of their families through poultry-growing enterprises. The foundation says the grant allows them to implement a strategy that gives rural farmers access to improved genetics, provides technical assistance and training, and allows access to new markets, with a goal of impacting 2.5 million households across Tanzania and Nigeria at the end of the four-year initiative. The goals are in alignment with the World Poultry Foundation’s mission, which has shifted from helping a trading partner out of self-interest (keeping the Russian market open to U.S. poultry) to helping people in underdeveloped nations where no gain is expected for the U.S. poultry industry. continue