10 highlights from 2019-2020
We have just published our detailed, illustrated Annual Review for the year 2019/20 which you can view here:
If you are short on time, here’s a quick look at our top ten highlights:
- Poultry Development Services: We distributed 20,252 poultry toolkits compared with 17,893 in 2019. We formed 29 groups and 430 families now operate successful poultry enterprises completely independently of us. This has been our greatest achievement to date as it proves the true sustainability of our approach that we – and others in the sector – strive to achieve.
- Agri-Management Services: We registered 1,562 new farmers resulting in a portfolio of 3,921 farmers organised into 235 Farmer Interest Groups. We made 1,286 links to Government of India farming initiatives or compensation schemes compared with 491 the year before. This has been particularly beneficial to our farmers whose crops were damaged by the devastating Cyclone Bulbul in November.
- Goat Farming: We expanded our pilot by a further 342 families to make 369 in total. Feedback from the farmers is that after approximately two years they have a sustainable goat enterprise with an average herd of eleven goats.
- Our response to Covid-19: We responded quickly by educating our beneficiaries about the pandemic, promoting hygiene and social distancing practices and supplying essential goods to the communities including face-masks. Nirdhan obtained permissions for all our staff to move around and we protected them all to do so with PPE.
- Measuring social impact: We repeated our 2016 baseline survey for 715 of our poultry farmers; data from the survey can be found in the report.
- Fundraising: We raised £330,371 to support our annual plan and budget including £35,103 of invaluable pro-bono support.
- House of Commons dinner: We held our third dinner at the House of Commons, generously hosted by Max Patel from St James’s Place Wealth Management. Joe and Chandrani visited from Kolkata for the occasion and we raised £41,245.
- Corporate engagement: We ran our third family field trip to India with our leading partner, the Artemis Charitable Foundation; it was described as “life-changing” for them and it was hugely motivating for us.
- Supporter engagement: We had a wonderful field trip to India with Jane Meyer form the T & J Meyer Foundation, Garlinda Birkbeck, Khursheed and Nawshir Khurody (Shivia Ambassadors) and Peter Wilson (one of our loyal, regular givers). They were all blown away by the dedication of the field team and the deep impact of the programmes.
- Governance: We appointed two new trustees, David Waring and Shailendra Patel.
One final highlight was when Louise Davis of Bretom created this wonderful animated video to illustrate our poultry farming programme:
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