Our Annual Review for 2022/23 is here!

We are delighted to publish our latest Annual Review, packed full of news about our programmes in both India and Madagascar where we launched Poultry Development Services in 2022 – our first time operating outside of India.

Please do take time to browse through the Review to read about everything we achieved in the year ending March 2023 to help some of the world’s most disadvantaged people start their own income-generating enterprise.

For quick preview, here are our Top Ten Highlights…

• Mission possible: Seeing the smiles on the faces of the many women who joined our poultry farming programme this year and have just started earning money by selling the chickens from their very first toolkit.

• Bio…dynamic: Reaching a big milestone – we have now worked with over 10,000 farmers on our Agri-management Services Programme, helping them to make farming affordable and sustainable, including Namita who was was formally recognised this year for her use of ‘vermi-composting’. She used the AMS training to make her own organic compost and is now selling it in her local community.

• Gone fishing: Listening to our beneficiaries, responding to their needs and launching a new livelihood programme in Fish Farming.

• Mission accomplished: Winding down operations at our Babnan location after ten years of serving some of the very poorest communities there. We are moving on to new locations further afield where there is a huge demand for PDS and AMS and where these programmes will continue to make a big impact on the lives of the very poor.

• Training for success: Hosting ‘exposure training visits’ for our new PDS farmers in Odisha by taking them to Kolkata to meet our most experienced farmers there. These women had never left their village before, let alone the State. They all returned home full of pride, new knowledge and enthusiasm and soon became excellent local ambassadors for the programme.

• Crossing continents: Launching PDS in Africa! Joe and Chandrani travelled to Madagascar to kick-start our PDS Programme there. Having completed the research and tweaked our model to suit the local context, we are now piloting the programme in three locations for 100 families. 

• From a virtual world to ‘in real life’: Being able totravel again after three Covid-restricted years. Joe and Chandrani flew to London to meet our supporters and Olly and Victoria travelled to West Bengal, Odisha and Gujarat to visit new locations, NGO partners and beneficiaries on all our programmes. We also led a real-life field trip for supporters from the Artemis Charitable Foundation. On both trips, it was truly inspiring to meet, face-to-face, people who are at different stages of their journey out of poverty.

• Oh what a night: Welcoming many Friends of Shivia to the Dinner and Auction at the House of Commons, kindly hosted by Max Patel from Shenley Private Wealth. We were delighted that Joe and Chandrani could be there to showcase our work in India, which resulted in many generous donations from our guests!

• Team work: Recruiting two new trustees to the Shivia Board – Prakash Kurup as Treasurer and Aditya Gokal as Finance Trustee; plus Smruti Das in Odisha who is supporting Joe with managing our growing partner portfolio. 

• On the red carpet: Celebrating our Third Sector award for ‘Small Charity, Big Achiever 2023’.

In case you missed it, here’s the recording of our Virtual Field Trip to India in April…