Kids goat farm - our work
Introduction
We have established three goat farms in Kenya in East Africa. The goat farms are located in arid and semi-arid regions of Kenya. These regions have little or no rainfall hence making the only viable income generating activity to be cattle and goat rearing for sale. In addition, the inhabitants namely, the Turkana (Lodwar and Lokichar region) and the Maasai (Kilgoris region) are nomadic in nature hence move from region to region.
These hardships together with their nomadic nature disrupts the children's upbringing and learning activities. The children usually lack basic needs such as proper food, clothing and shelter as well as a good and suitable education.
With this in mind we resorted to establishing farms in these regions with specific focus on the children's welfare. The farms were established as income generating ventures in conjuction with the local communities. Where each farm would have a caretaker of the goats bought for the farm. Each caretaker would be assigned a laptop for each farm thus able to keep, update and view all the records of the individual farm.
In addition every goat purchased would be assigned to an individual under-previleged and orphaned child with the aim of growing the number of individual goats and the farm in general.
The Idea
We undertake the task of identifying the less privileged children through our contacts on the ground and identify the easily accessible goat market in the project area. After this step, the goats are bought for the kids ensuring that every kid receives a goat and this marks the beginning of the Kids Goat Farm.
The idea is that after a while, the goats will give birth to little ones which grow and before we realize, the individual kid will have raised a farm with many goats. On the ground we have a caretaker who goes around to supervise every farm and ensure all is well and the goats are well maintained.
This will eventually translate into thousands of goat farms across the country for poor children.
Vision
So far we have 3 goat farms supporting these children in 3 locations. This is broken down as follows:-
Lokichar...30 Adult Goats....30 New Births. Totalling...60 goats.
Lodwar.....61 Adult Goats....48 New Births. Totalling...109 goats.
Kilgoris.....37 Adult Goats....3 New Births. Totalling....40 goats.
The Farms
Currently there are three goat farms in Kenya. One in Lodwar, Turkana district, another in Lokichar, Turkana district and the third one in Kilgoris, Maasai region.
Fruits / Results
The results of this project are that the kids are able to have security in their education process and other life's needs from their Goat Farms. We also plan to establish a mechanism where we are able to process dairy products from the milk acquired from the goats. This adds to the nutritional life of the malnourished kids as well as serve as an income generating project for the Kids.
All in all there is great positivity from the project so far and the farms are projected to grow further and increase in size and numbers.