Utete, TZ – Egg group learns from experience – 30 July 2014

The Bates Banda chicken business team continues to work hard, persevere, and learn more every month about the business of running an egg-laying operation. Since beginning their project the team has experienced periods of profit and periods of difficulty. The past month saw a number of challenges, but the team has learned from all of them and is hoping to be in a position to continue growing their business and repaying their loan over the next few months.

The biggest challenge the team faced last month was getting chicken food from Dar es Salaam. It is very important that the chickens receive proper nutrition so they stay healthy and produce eggs at a high rate. However, there is nowhere between Dar es Salaam and Kindwitwi to buy good chicken food. In the past, the team would place an order for chicken food, send money to the dealers with their cell phones, and the dealers would send the food with a trusted motorbike deliveryman to the bus station where it would be loaded on a passenger bus to Kindwitwi. While complicated, this system was much cheaper than the team members going all the way to Dar es Salaam (eight hours round trip on a bus) to purchase the food themselves. Often the buses would break down and people would be stuck in Dar overnight, further increasing the cost of getting food.

A couple of months ago, store owners decided they no longer wanted be involved in food delivery because it was outside of their core business. This meant that every month a member of the chicken business team would have to travel to Dar es Salaam to purchase food in person. After a couple of months it became clear that this was hurting the viability of the business. In their search for a more cost-effective solution, the team delayed in buying proper food. During the last month, five chickens died (in the previous 11 months, a total of five chickens had died).

The team came up with the solution of using a contact in Dar es Salaam to purchase the food and send it to the bus station. The contact would charge a small fee plus the cost of transport to the bus station, but it would still be cheaper than sending a team member from Kindwitwi. On Friday, the 25^th, the team received their shipment of food and now the chickens are back to their normal feeding.

Over the last month, egg production decreased to an average of 45 eggs per day. The team should be able to get 90 eggs per day. They are hoping that returning to a proper feeding schedule will get them back to their objective. The market for eggs has been good, so they know each egg goes straight to their bottom line.