Goats – income-generating projects update

Over the course of the last nine to twelve months or so, the ‘Sales Shelf’ outside a house in St Mary Bourne offered anything from garden plants and flowers to unwanted household and shed items and then birdboxes and bug hotels. People offered donations for what they took away.

All the proceeds would go to a women’s project in Mityana.

We buy 10 goats, 9 nannies and one billy and women are selected from small community to receive the nanny goats and the priest has the billy! During the early stages of ownership, the women are taught how look after and maintain a good health programme for their goat. Each new project costs a little under £600 and the billy goat is replaced twice with a small emergency pot and the women have to undertake a commitment to give one kid back to the programme so that another woman can be selected to own a goat. Our pilot scheme, begun in 2019, has now had 11 kids born (one set of twins) and all have survived to date.

Amazingly the ‘Sales Shelf’ has raised £827.24 so far! Thank you so much to everyone who donated. We are aiming at £1,000, some of which will go towards the 2022 Goats project. We have twelve village communities which we support. Five of them now have these income generating schemes and by 2022 we hope to have seven up and running.

Canon Dodie Marsden writes, “Thank you to everyone for their help. I had no idea how successful this would be. I will let you know when we hit our target. The Sales Shelf when it starts again will be across the road from where it was before.”