Truly amazing: hens helping to teach basic agricultural management and entrepreneurial skills, thereby addressing hunger, unemployment and the lack of education and business skills. Here’s how.

The Innovation Empowerment Programme and its chief project, One Hen Campaign, was founded in 2009 by 4 Kenyan students from the University of Nairobi who were inspired by their studies in entrepreneurship. They registered their NGO in 2010 in Kenya. “Our mission is to empower the low income earners economically especially the youths, women and children, to ensure they contribute in a comprehensive and sustainable way towards achieving Millennium Development Goals (MDGS) and Vision 2030. We mooted the idea of starting small armed with the remains of our higher education loan and we came up with our flagship ‘One Hen Campaign Project’ where we mobilize youths and women in villages to form and register self-help groups, we then advance a microloan to each member in form of one indigenous hen and a cage, after 6 months one donates 2 pullets (once) for onward lending and sustainability of the project. The hen and cage creates a platform for us to train members on poultry management, agribusiness, financial management, entrepreneurship, adaptation to climate change, value chain, conflict resolution and other cross-cutting issues. The impetus of the project was high unemployment levels; escalating levels of hunger; high dependents ratios in families especially on father-figures and the employed; diminishing sizes of land as a factor of production; general lack of basic business skills i.e. book-keeping and lastly need to train young people to embrace agriculture as it’s the backbone of our economy.”

For more information on exactly how this program works, click here. This regional story shows local ingenuity and impact. Can the example in Kenya be replicated elsewhere?