Trillion Trees for Million Livelihoods

Small Livestock like goat /sheep farming has direct dependence on plants and forests for their feed. 80% of goat and sheep farmers are forest dwellers or lives near to forest fringe villages or gets maximum benefits of common lands, building their direct economic return and involvement as stakeholders seems a promising opportunity across the globe. Availability of trees and shrubs reduces cost of small livestock farming by 60% and enhances profitability on sustainable basis. Besides proper pruning and use of fallen leaves reduces chances of forest fire. In return goats/Sheep/Poultry provides much needed organic manure to soil making soil rich and in turn healthy environment. Women are the strongest stakeholders of plantation and forest however they are hardly involved in plant protection and farmers has not been able to articulate long term vision which is critical for forest and plantation related sustainable work.

Solution links direct economic return to small livestock farmers to make them strong stakeholder in plantation and plant protection. Linking one of critical need of livestock farmers - Credit, savings, Insurance and leasing with plantation can build an SMART incentives to build stakes and address three core problems of forest and plantation protection - Livelihoods, Gender disparity and inclusive finance, and overall sustainable approach as it reduces cost of production and sustainable livelihoods and employment to the most disadvantaged community without larger investment

The Goat Trust has been piloting?an innovation of interest subsidy to these farmers to acquire quality goats and working capital linked with loans, saving and insurance ( Critical need for women goat farmers as less than 4% has credit access and less than 1% has livestock insurance access).

As poor wants short term benefits to survive, The Goat Trust has set up a Livestock Development Bank with interest subsidy to women livestock farmers if they plant and protect tress of a few selected species and adopts rotation grazing, social protection mechanism. Women members gets 0.1% interest subsidy for every plant (selected species like Moringa Sp, Azadiracta sps and 20 more) of over 6 months. Their saving similarly gets 0.1% higher interest rate by Livestock bank. So women members get benefits of production cost reduction and interest benefits from Farmer Producer company

Our Vision is involve such disadvantaged landless poor families as strong stakeholder of local biodiversity and replicate it similar areas where small livestock density is high ( Asia and Africa holds 90% of small livestock) and poverty has been on rise leading to adverse effects on health, nutrition and livelihoods. The Goat Trust envisions to organise 1 million such families in Farmer producer collectives and provide them interest subsidy on livestock financial services to build a business model managed by local community across globe.

Present Livestock development banks has four basic steps to opertinalize the model -

1.????Organizing small livestock farming women at village and cluster level and forming their own business organisation - Farmer Producer organisation

2.????Provide them low cost technologies , capacity building support to launch and manage Livestock bank for livestock financial services - Loan, leasing, saving and insurance

3.????Link plantation & its protection with interest subsidy with financial products to have direct stakes /interest of landless poor farmers in managing it

4.????Build herbals for livestock and human health management drive and build a large business like of Azardicta sps (Neem) oil, Moringa Powder , Alover juices, Satavari based human and animal food, Gilloy juice, Jamun powder as herbal health products as core business of Farmer producer organisation to have both short and long term benefits to community and their own business institutions

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Written by

Sanjeev Kumar

Advisor – The Goat Trust

The Goat Trust is a pro poor resource organisation on small livestock based livelihoods. It has undertaken a mission to enable women small livestock (Goat/Sheep/Pig/Poultry) farmers to take command of local resources and use it efficiently for sustainable livelihoods. It has supported over 180 organisations & Farmer producer companies to build a systematic & sustainable approach in managing local Forests, plantation to use it for livestock farming and strengthen its value chain to build sustainable livelihoods.