Tanzania Poultry Industry to Benefit from USD21.4m Grant
Tanzania’s poultry industry will benefit from a four-year USD21.4m grant, aimed
at enhancing the country’s poultry production. The grant is provided by the
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to the World Poultry Foundation (WPF),
which will disburse the funds to Tanzania and Nigeria to improve their poultry
industries.
This will be achieved through close collaboration between the WPF
and the countries’ governments and private sector partners. The initiative is
expected to increase poultry production and productivity through the access of
low-input dual purpose birds, increase rural household income, improve
household nutrition and empower women.
“This grant provides us with an
opportunity to implement a strategy that creates access of improved genetics to
the rural famers, provides technical assistance and training, and offers access
to markets that may not have been possible before,” said Randall Ennis, CEO of
the WPF.
“Our goal is to impact 2.5m households across Tanzania and Nigeria by
the end of this four-year initiative. Unlike past approaches of delivering free
chicks and feed to the rural farmers, this project will focus on training and
extension support to build a sustainable value chain,” Ennis said. “Another key
component of the project is the establishment of over 1,500 entrepreneurial
enterprises – primarily owned and managed by women – that will supply healthy
brooded and vaccinated chicks to the rural smallholder farmers,” he added. The
WPF is a non-profit organization committed promoting economic development in
emerging markets outside of the US by providing education and technical
training on poultry production.
Tanzania Poultry Tanzania’s poultry sub-sector
is mainly divided into a traditional and commercial production system.
Traditional poultry kept are mainly chicken (90%) with the remaining small
proportion being ducks, ostriches, pigeons and geese. According to the Tanzania
Poultry Breeders Association (TPBA), traditional chicken shows a high potential
to improve food security, household income of rural people, particularly
disadvantaged groups such as women and children.
“Despite traditional chicken
being dominant it is still characterized by low production coefficients that
are, high chick mortality, low annual egg production, low chick turnover and
low annual off take,” the TPBA notes. Low production in traditional chicken is
attributed to low genetic potential of indigenous ecotype chicken in terms of
growth rate and egg production, poor husbandry practices in terms of low and
poor quality nutrition, lack of disease control measures, poor or
unavailability of houses and lack of bio-security measures and lack of
commercial orientation. Commercial poultry production in Tanzania is still
limited because of lack of farmers focused in poultry production, high capital
investment, unorganized market of poultry and poultry products, unreliable
supply of day old chicks, lack of reliable supply of quality poultry feeds,
high veterinary and poultry feed costs and lack of poultry processing
industries, the TPBA indicates. Tanzania’s per capita consumption of poultry
meat is estimated at about 15 kg per annum.
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