Gisagara, Rwanda, Jeanine Nyirahabimana, a mother living in Southern Rwanda, began her journey toward escaping poverty with 10 Chickens. Today that flock has the potential to grow into a successful home-based business that ultimately saved the life of her child and secured the financial future of her family.
Prior to 2023, Nyirahabimana and her family faced an extreme lack of the most essential requirement for life: proper nutrition. Due to the absence of an adequate diet, her son suffered from malnutrition at 6 years of age; furthermore, most of the items found in a balanced diet (ie,s: assortment of eggs and fresh vegetables) were Luxuries to a family who could barely afford to put food on the table every day.
The day that transformed Nyirahabimana’s life was when she received a grant from the Partnership for Resiliency and Inclusive Small Livestock Market (PRISM), which provided her with 10 chickens as well as providing her with training to learn how to operate a small-scale farm.
“My family depended on those eggs, especially my.” Nyirahabimana explained. “Before receiving those eggs, my child had malnutrition; now we have eggs at home and the health of my child has improved as well as we now have different kinds of daily meals.”
The training she had received extended far beyond raising chickens; it taught her how to grow mushrooms as well as how to keep a kitchen garden. This resulted in her no longer needing to purchase any food at the grocery store because she was able to grow her own vegetables on her property and eat freshly grown organic produce. She also found that she could sell the mushrooms as a high-protein alternative to meat and allow for a profit from that as well.
Her son’s little farm had grown dramatically in just a short amount of time. The 10 original chickens were now up to 34 in total. With the income generated from selling eggs, vegetables, and mushrooms, she was able to join a community savings club.
Eventually, those savings led to what the family thought they would never be able to do: purchase a cow. The cow now provides manure to fertilize Nyirahabimana’s crops, as well as providing her with an additional source of savings (a livestock bank) for her family's future.
Nyirahabimana's journey has not just been about financial success; she now has the means to pay her children's school fees and be a contributing member of the household, completely transforming her position in her family.
She says, "I relied primarily on my husband to support my family," Then, "Now I have also contributed something towards our income as an additional source of support, which enabled us women who do these things, to have more confidence about ourselves and what we can achieve."
Through her success with the diverse, small-scale animal-based businesses that she started in Gisagara, Nyirahabimana is a great example of how providing some form of support from these types of enterprises to create a guaranteed future safety cushion for families that live in rural areas.
