Women in Livestock Development Program
Part of Heifer's Gender Equity Initiative
In many of the countries where Heifer works, women and girls find few opportunities for education and paying jobs. They have far less control over the family’s income and resources than their brothers, fathers and husbands. School, a career and independence seem far out of their reach.
That’s why Heifer International established the Women in Livestock Development (WiLD) Initiative in 1988. The goal, WiLD co-founder Rosalee Sinn explained, is to help women care for themselves, their families, the earth and each other. A project is designated as WiLD if 70 percent or more of the participants are women. As WiLD expanded, Heifer began focusing less on women alone and more on helping build strong partnerships between men and women. This marked the beginning of Heifer’s gender equity initiative, an ongoing project to build stronger families and communities.
Every year, Heifer recognizes the most remarkable of these women and these projects with two awards: the Grassroots Award, for a superlative project and outstanding individuals, and the Meritorious Award, for supporting women and advancing the cause of gender equity.
What follows are the 2006-07 winners, whose efforts and determination inspire all of us. WiLD winners, we salute you!
 From a Burden to a Blessing
Grassroots Award Winner - Sabitra Guragain
For most of her life, neighbors and relatives considered Sabitra Guragain of Nepal a burden and a curse. Called a bad omen because her mother died shortly after she was born, Guragain spent her childhood cooking, cleaning and herding cattle. Although she was a precocious child, her father and brother refused to send her to school, saying that educating a girl was a waste of time and money. She eventually enrolled in a local school where her progress was rapid, but when she reached the age of 15 her brother was unwilling to continue paying for her education, and married her off to a man from a neighboring village.
By the age of 21, Guragain had three children. She and her husband struggled to make ends meet, eventually moving in with a neighbor, for whom Guragain did housework to pay the rent. The family was able to scrape together a meager living from the tiny income Guragain’s husband made pulling a rickshaw. For Guragain, the low point came when her son came to her crying for milk, which he had seen the neighbor’s child drinking. She and her husband gave their son rice water mixed with sugar and told him it was milk. “That night my husband and I couldn’t sleep at all,” she remembers. “We wished we were dead instead.”
At the beginning of 1999, Guragain heard about a program supported by Heifer International that provided women with training, helped them form a small savings fund, and eventually gave them a water buffalo. Guragain’s husband initially resisted the idea, saying they were too poor to contribute to the group fund, but Guragain persisted, finally convincing a group of 15 desperately poor women like her to form the Shrijanshil Krishi Mahila Bachat Samuha, or Creative Women Savings Group.
Each member began contributing 11 Nepalese Rupees ($0.16) monthly toward the group fund. In August of 2000, each member of the group received a buffalo from Heifer. “The buffalo was a boon that transformed my life,” says Guragain. With the income from surplus milk, the group members saved money toward passing on the gift, and eventually increased their savings to 100 Nepalese Rupees ($1.43). Required to pass on the gift within three years, Guragain completed the pass-on in just 11 months. “I could not see my suffering neighbor wait longer for the gift,” she said.
Today, the child that no one encouraged is a leader in her village. Under her guidance, the group undertook a variety of civic improvement projects to improve the roads into the village, build a public pit toilet and mediate conflicts and disputes. The savings fund has increased to the equivalent of $2,500, and the group has donated to Heifer Cambodia.
However, perhaps Guragain’s most remarkable accomplishment has been to build a school on public land for Mushar children, who are some of the poorest in the area and severely handicapped by caste discrimination. It is a small school, but it already has a very good reputation, and Guragain is determined that no one will be left behind.
Doing Good and Reaping the Rewards
Grassroots Award Winner Dile Prekpalaj
For Dile Prekpalaj of Kosova, generosity was something she inherited from her family. She recalls her grandmother telling her, “If you do something bad, it will come back to you seven times worse, but if you do well, it will be rewarded by God.”
Prekpalaj, who was one of the first women from her village to attend school, was first moved to help the people of her community in 1999, when Serbian forces began attacking the Albanian families in the nearby village of Krusha e Vogel. The Serbians took the men to be killed, and left the women and children on the outskirts of the village.
“When the Serbian police left,” Perkpalaj said, “we went and took them to our homes. As we were leaving we could hear the gunshots, and everyone knew what they were.”
Prekpalaj organized her village to come to the assistance of the refugees, and traveled with them from Kosova to Albania. When the Serbian forces were defeated, Prekpalaj and the refugees returned to their villages in Kosova. For the women of Krusha e Vogel, where there had once been a thriving community, there was now utter destruction. Their houses had been burned and their animals slaughtered. For those whose husbands had been killed, they faced the task of rebuilding their lives alone.
Prekpalaj approached the women of Krusha e Vogel about forming a farmers’ association to help them support themselves again. “The women had no self-confidence, no vision for the future,” said Ora Bytyci, a spokesperson for Heifer International Kosova. “They agreed to start something, anything that would help them overcome their terrible situation.”
The program, which began as a simple livestock project with support from the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, soon became a more focused effort to restore not only the livelihoods of the war widows and their families but also their communities. The project, supported by Heifer International, was called Trauma Relief for War Widows in Kosova, and its first objective was to help reduce the social isolation of the widows by connecting them through a common project, a dairy project.
As Prekpalaj helped the women launch their micro-enterprise, collecting milk from their cows and finding a production plant to buy it, the group began to come together. “The women started to open up and communicate with each other,” Bytyci said. “They shared their thoughts and their worries, and their ideas for the future.”
 In the Habit of Doing Good
Meritorious Award Winner Sister Alexandra Buretta
The area around Moshi, a small mountain town in northeastern Tanzania, is home to hundreds of far-flung families who have one thing in common: They are the charges of Sister Alexandra Buretta, who has worked tirelessly to help women begin livestock and gender equity projects with Heifer International.
“If she would ride a motorbike, I would get one for her,” said Dr. Alson Lyimo, who oversees the diocese that is home to 26 pig-raising projects.
However, Sister Buretta prefers to travel on foot or by public transportation. “Every time she comes to me and tells me about another project, I say, ‘Are you sure you can do this?’ And she is.” Dr. Lyimo shakes his head. “I can’t say no.”
Since 2002, Sister Alexandra has been working with women’s groups throughout the Moshi Diocese of the Catholic Church, transforming the church’s nascent gender equity program from a group of a few women learning to sew into a widespread network of successful projects. The pig-raising projects are quietly revolutionary, transforming standards of living as well as ways of thinking, in tribes where pigs have never been raised and among women who have never been allowed to own livestock.
Sister Buretta uses Heifer’s Cornerstones as an integral part of her approach. Her education on Genuine Need and Justice, for example, was so effective that the women chose to give the first round of pigs primarily to the widows in their groups and to those suffering from AIDS. Nutrition has improved among the families involved in the project, as they have increased their crop production with manure, are eating high-protein pork and are able to buy more nutritious foods with the added income. Most of all, Sister Buretta has helped everyone understand, through education and by example, the importance of participation and hard work. Men, women and children work together in Sister Buretta’s projects, and this has improved their physical health and economic situations, as well as led to greater understanding.
Sister Buretta tells the story of one project participant who, in describing his wife, called her “keen and intelligent” and added, “She is cleverer than me.” When she heard this, Sister Buretta applauded. It was the first time, she says, that she had ever heard a man from his tribe describe a woman as being more clever than he.
Prized Pigs Bring Prosperity
Grassroots Award Winner The Zongochia Family-Farming Initiative Group
Cooperation and thrift brought the 45 members of the Zongochia Family-Farming Initiative Group together in 1999, and soon these farmers in Wum, Cameroon, were helping each other to save money and care for their land.
In 2002, the group of 19 men and 26 women decided to push themselves further to improve their families’ diets and income. Zongochia members began working with Heifer Cameroon, constructing pigsties and undergoing training to help them set up a pig production business. In 2005, the group received its first shipment of 40 piglets.
The group’s success with the pig project was immediate. Barely four months after receiving the pigs, the group sold its first batch and was able to fulfill the passing on the gift requirement, making them the first in its region to complete the pass-on. With the money earned from the piglets, the group restocked their farms with new piglets and now maintains a healthy balance in a savings fund.
Already, these farm families are reaping rewards. They now send their children to school, something they previously could not afford. One woman, Agem Esther, bought a sewing machine for her daughter, who is learning to design dresses. The families also improved their living conditions by plastering their houses with cement to make them weatherproof, replacing grass roofs with corrugated aluminum ones and acquiring new land for vegetable farming.
In a country where discussion of HIV and AIDS is considered taboo although many families struggle with it, group member Tegha Comfort was able to convince a group of 35, both group members and their families, to go for voluntary AIDS counseling and testing. However, perhaps the most remarkable part of this group’s efforts has been the high level of participation and the equal distribution of tasks. Eighty percent of group members participate fully in its activities. Men and boys help with cooking and washing clothes, and women and girls split firewood and clean the pigsties.
This collaboration did not go unnoticed by neighbors. Today, members of the Wum community ask women in the group to help settle disputes within their own families. The group is particularly proud of their success with one Kili Lucas, a group member who was shirking his family duties but who, after attending gender training, is now fully involved with supporting his wife, children and grandchildren.
 Passing on the Pigs
Grassroots Award Winner Las Dinamicas
In the aftermath of Hurricane Mitch, which devastated much of Central America in 1998, families in Las Camelias, Honduras, banded together to bounce back. The Las Dinamicas pig-raising project began in 2000 as a way to help families still recovering from the destruction. After a member of the Las Dinamicas Cooperative trained at a Heifer cattle and pig management session, Heifer International gave Las Dinamicas members 35 female and three male pigs.
In part because of the demanding local market for pigs, the project dramatically improved each family’s income. Each project pig gives birth to 11 piglets twice a year, allowing each family to sell 22 pigs annually. Families also retain a few for breeding, which further increases production.
The project is helping families repair and improve their homes. Some income was also used to improve small farming plots and to make handicrafts for sale at local markets.
Membership continues to grow in the project and new participants—many of them women—have received pigs as pass-ons from existing members. The group also passed on pigs to women’s groups in neighboring communities. Members of the cooperative formed an environmental committee to oversee the community-wide replanting of trees lost in the hurricane.
Since the project began, all members of the community seem to be contributing more. The men in the village helped with the construction, repair, and maintenance of livestock pens, and served as watchmen during the reproduction and delivery stages of the livestock breeding.
Cooperative members are now leaders in the community, with members serving as president of the community’s patronage council, president of the community’s water committee and a member of the community’s civil defense organization.
Cooperative members continue taking extra training to help them improve the living conditions of their animals, improvements that increase production and reduce disease. On a recent day, project participant Felicita Ochoa showed off her sow, nursing its piglets in a sunny stall. The pen was clean and freshly swept, and the piglets, though young, were already plump and healthy.
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