Miracle in Miatuini
How Training and Access to Credit Transformed the Life of a Kenyan Chicken Farmer
More than anything else, Susan Muthoni dreaded the walk to school. Every step of the way was an agonizing one and it usually ended with a beating. For most of the children in her village in central Kenya, the four-km journey was less of an ordeal. They would skip along, laughing and chasing each other. But Susan, born with one leg shorter than the other, always struggled to keep up.
“I always seemed to be late, particularly if it had been raining as I would forever be slipping in the mud,” she said as she recalled her childhood with a rueful laugh. “My teacher would always beat me, but I didn’t want to share my issues because the other children always laughed at me, which hurt my self-esteem. So, I stayed silent.”
Susan is now fifty-five. Until recently, her adult grown-up life was mostly as tough as her childhood. She found a loving husband, Edward, and together they had three children, but there was rarely enough to live on. They survived, mostly, off the land, keeping a handful of chickens and goats and cultivating black beans and cowpeas, legumes that were more likely to survive when the rains failed, as they often did in South Ngariama, the rural area which they call home.
To make ends meet, particularly when drought killed their produce, they worked for others as casual laborers — something that rarely brought in more than $1 a day. “Life was extreme,” Susan said. “Things were so hard that we often could only have one meal a day, using whatever flour was left over to make maize cornmeal for the children.” Often it was impossible to pay school fees, and the children would be sent home in disgrace.
Eventually, Susan and Edward had to make the tough decision to let just one of their children complete their education — a choice they knew would most likely lead the other two to repeat the lives of poverty endured by their parents. Their children grew and in time had children of their own, meaning there were now more mouths to feed. There was simply not enough to go around. When her youngest grandchild fell ill, no one could afford the necessary medical treatment to keep the child alive. A grave in Susan’s garden represents the darkest moment in her life.
But then, after so much hardship, things finally took a turn for the better. Three years ago, she was visiting a nearby village to see friends and came across a training session, led by Hand in Hand International, that was teaching subsistence farmers just like herself how to turn a hand-to-mouth existence into a sustainable and profitable agri-business.
Susan approached the trainer, asking if the program could be extended to her village of Miatuini — and was encouraged to recruit a group of others to sign up for the program. Within a few weeks, she and her fellow villagers had become part of an initiative, led by Hand in Hand and, funded by the Hilti Foundation, that is transforming the lives of 50,000 farmers across Kenya and Tanzania. Many have livelihoods as precarious as Susan’s.
For Thomas Jimbo Alai, a program manager at Hand in Hand, Susan was exactly the kind of person the project was trying to reach. — She was female and lived well below the international poverty line of $2.15 a day, but she also had with the resourcefulness and determination to flourish if given a helping hand.
“We target the poor and the socially marginalized, forming them into self-help groups, whom we equip with the business skills needed for them to become independent and start to lift themselves out of poverty,” he said.
Susan has done just that, transforming not just her life but that of her family’s, too.
Hand in Hand’s trainers encouraged Susan’s group to concentrate on higher-margin farming sectors like dairy and poultry. They then taught them how to improve yields through better agricultural practices, how to club together so that every beneficiary would have access to credit, and how to employ financial management techniques such as basic cash flow and budgeting.
Each member of the group was required to deposit a small sum of money, starting at $0.40, into a communal pot they controlled collectively, a process called table banking. One person was then selected to be the beneficiary of the lump sum and mentored by Hand in Hand on how to use this start-up investment in the most sensible way. The process then began again, with everyone making a second deposit that was lent to a new beneficiary, until everyone had been given an initial lump sum — a “merry-go-round” system of credit, as Hand in Hand calls it.
For Susan, who had never had access to credit in her life, this was a revolution that opened new horizons. She used her first loan of 500 Kenyan shillings ($3.85) from the table bank to buy chicks, which she put to best use as her trainers mentored her in the principles of cycle management.
Over time, her poultry stock grew, and she now keeps 100 chickens in three-month cycles, buying them as chicks, collecting their eggs as they mature and then selling them when they are fully grown.
But the chickens are not her only revenue stream. She also has a herd of eight goats, whose nutrient-rich milk supplements her grandchildren’s diets and earns her extra cash. As the table bank has grown over time, thanks to the modest interest charged on each withdrawal, Susan’s access to credit has also blossomed.
She is now repaying a $77 loan, which she used to buy a 2,500-liter water tank, and has plans to purchase a pump to irrigate and expand her produce crops — innovations that will mitigate the droughts that have grown ever more extreme thanks to climate change. She is planning to grow her own feed, which will reduce her input costs further, increase her profit margins and spare her the long and painful walk to the agricultural shop where she has been buying it until now.
Along each step of her expansion, Hand in Hand has been there, not just to advise her on how to plug her nascent agribusiness into agricultural value chains, but also to provide additional credit from their Enterprise Incubation Fund. In addition, it has renovated and extended Susan’s chicken coops, goat pens and water well.
Susan’s financial returns speak for themselves. Before she joined the Hand in Hand program, she would typically earn about $15 a month. She now makes $115. In a country like Kenya, this is already life-changing.
Susan has ambitions to grow her business even more, but for the moment, she is just happy with how different life is. The time of eating once a day is now firmly in the past. Her family can even afford to eat meat, and everyone is healthier now that they have a more balanced diet. More importantly, her grandchildren are settled and secure at school. No longer are they sent home for not being able to afford the fees thanks to Susan stepping in when necessary.
As for Susan, she now has access to something she never had as a child: calcium supplements to strengthen the bones in her legs and pills to relieve the pain. And, of course, she also has shoes as well.
“Life has changed immeasurably for Susan,” says Werner Wallner, Managing Director of the Hilti Foundation. "Her family no longer goes hungry and the stress of never having enough money has receded. For the first time in her life, Susan is healthy, happy, hopeful and free from pain – thanks to her courage and the guidance of our program.”
Respected by her village, and sought out by neighbors, friends and acquaintances for advice, Susan Muthoni’s life has changed beyond measure. No one is laughing at her anymore.