In the News

Heifer International Rwanda country director Charles Kayumba said they will also get involved in value chains to link farmers to the market, link the farmers with service providers and financial institutions.

“We are aiming at transforming the lives of 300 small holder farmers through pilot-testing a dairy micro-leasing model in Omoro and Gulu district by 2018,” said William Matovu, the Heifer Uganda Country Director.

When a research team proposed in 2014 that we support an impact evaluation of a Heifer International program in Nepal, I was primarily intrigued in the asset transfer component of their three-arm program, which also includes human and social capital development.

“Nature isn’t giving the people any slack,” said Hervil Cherubin, country director for Heifer International, an international nonprofit working with farmers in Haiti.

When Heifer International first arrived in Cambodia in 1984, just five years after the fall of the Khmer Rouge, it was one of only a handful of western NGOs operating on the ground. Vietnamese forces occupied the country, tasked with rebuilding a nation that had seen every institution — from banks, to courts, to schools — destroyed.

Irma Consuelo Cano was tempted to leave her coffee-growing community in the highlands of western Guatemala to seek work in the U.S. to earn more money for her children. However, she developed second thoughts when she began considering what her children’s lives would be like if she left them behind. She finally decided not to leave her hometown of Aldea Rancho Viejo. What got her to stay? Honeybees.

A little easier to overlook, however, and more pertinent to the story at hand, there are a few boxes that do not have numbers and bear only the words “Seagoing Cowboys.”
In a word, this—all of this contained within Heifer International’s archive—is what it’s taken to get animals shipped clear across the world and into the hands of people who need them over the course of a 73-year history.

Until few years ago, Kimsara Khadka of Maintada, Surkhet, was unaware that money could be grown from livestock fodder grass. When she heard about the idea of grass farming three years ago, she was surprised.

Based in Arkansas, USA in Heifer’s headquarters, British-born Hilary Haddigan joined the organisation 17 years ago and now holds the unusual title of the Chief of Mission Effectiveness. She talks to Glass about how Heifer sets about achieving such immense goals as solving issues that have been present since the dawn of humanity, as well as her role and the lessons it has taught her.

Every day when I hear stories about migrants leaving the United States or living in fear of being deported, I think of people like Gloria Recinos. The single mother was getting ready to move from Guatemala a few years ago because she wasn’t making enough money growing coffee to support her two daughters.