September 2019 LAC Update Guatemala Chicken Coops

Serving Central America, Cuba and The Caribbean

September, 2019.

Project: Chicken Coop Program | Empowering small poultry farmers in
Guatemala.

Location: Chinandega, Nicaragua.

The Chicken Coop Program is an initiative that seeks to aid impoverished
communities by empowering families to develop poultry farm microenterprises. The program focuses on supporting beneficiaries in setting up these animal husbandry (chicken coop) microbusinesses for income-generation and nutrition improvement in a sustainable way. This aid is far-reaching—even multiplied—in terms of the numbers of beneficiaries positively impacted. This program helps beneficiaries provide for themselves and be able to lift themselves and their families through savings derived from the sale of surplus chicken eggs.

The Program is in its pilot stage in which has targeted 10 participant families in the department of Zacapa, Guatemala (preferably lowincome families or families headed by single mothers). These families received each a donated one greenhouse-style chicken coop, and around 20-25 hens ready to lay eggs. Production is estimated to be close to 18 eggs per day throughout the program, families will save any eggs they don’t consume to sell them on the market. The savings are used to purchase additional hens, build more coops or launch other types of small businesses, thus improving the family’s diet and enhancing the ability of beneficiary families to be self-reliant. This also allows families to invest in other economic endeavors, their families’ needs, the education of their children, and other necessities.

Today, many rural Guatemalans focus most of their energy on averting starvation. They endure unimaginable living conditions such as lack of shelter, clean water, medical care, modern sanitation or even a stove to prepare food. These challenges, coupled with the fact that most of the inhabitants came from the country’s underprivileged indigenous population, make Guatemala’s outskirts a
place of hardship and tension, where the poor continue to struggle to survive by working as day laborers or renting plots of farmland. Guatemalans in rural Zacapa have greatly benefitted from having a new sustainable source of income and food in the form of these Chicken Coops.