Sustainable Livelihoods for the Rural Poor through Small Scale Poultry Rearing

In Bangladesh, where almost 80% of the population lives in rural areas and primarily depends upon subsistence agriculture and livestock for their livelihoods, poultry makes a significant contribution to both poverty reduction and improving food security. Small scale poultry has a special role to play since it is primarily women in rural areas who rear small poultry units within the homestead.

BRAC and the Department of Livestock Services (DLS) of the Government of Bangladesh supported a range of interventions to strengthen homestead based poultry rearing and related activities with the objective of facilitating a regular and sustainable income for rural women by overcoming constraints in smallholder poultry rearing such as poor management, inappropriate breeds, lack of supplementary feed and access to health services. Also known as the BRAC-DLS model or the Bangladesh model, these interventions have been evaluated at regular intervals to study their impact on the livelihoods of rural communities, and have since been replicated in different parts of the country with location-specific modifications.

This Good Practice note reviews the BRAC-DLS Poultry Model and illustrates how smallholder poultry production can help in income generation and empowerment of women while mitigating malnutrition, unemployment and poverty. It describes how smallholder poultry production was mainstreamed to be a source of employment and facilitate improved livelihoods for the rural poor.

Authors: M.A. Saleque, Mamta Dhawan 

To learn more about this Good Practice open/download from the link below.

• GP Note  3MB