In Mullativu we helped set up a community run poultry farm with our local partner ADT. ADT had been undertaking a community development project in the village and one of the requests from the village was to help them restart their poultry farm. During the war, the village had been the location of a large poultry farm that provided meat and eggs for the region.

The community were really excited to restart the farm and we supported them in reconstructing damaged buildings, registering the business and training members in business administration and marketing.

During the war the village was mainly used to provide labour for the farm, but through this project it would be owned and run by the community.

The village members were excited but nervous about starting the business as they wanted to make sure it was a success. In order to do this they started off with a small number of chickens with the aim to increase the numbers as they become more comfortable running the farm.

They faced a number of challenges including government departments pulling out foundations to the buildings over a land dispute (even though the community had all the correct paper work) and even other village putting a curse on the farm because they were jealous of what was happening!

They named the business “Symphonic” because only through all of the community working together they will make a beautiful song.

This project exemplified the incredible resilience of the people of the Northern province. Their unwavering determination to strive towards a better future for their families no matter what the obstacles. Listening to members of the village speak with such pride about their business and how they believed it would succeed was incredibly inspiring.

19 Aug This entry was published on August 19, 2014 at 11:01 am. It’s filed under Photography, Travel and tagged chicken, farm, ngo, Photography, Sri Lanka, Travel. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.