Challenge
Goats play a key role in food security and income generating activities in India. However, the livestock supply chains are predominantly an informal industry that, due to a lack of knowledge on current best practices, faces high rates of inefficiency and lost hours of productivity due. Most of the revenue generated from the goat diary benefits supply chain intermediaries, not the goat farmers who are left with a low revenue rate.
Farmers who wish to grow their business and increase their revenue lack access to the needed financial, technical, and market systems. This is due to the fact that 83% of goats in India belong to landless small-scale farmers in drought prone areas that lack the ability to cope with climate change. Developing more sustainable farming systems and goat-rearing businesses requires external intervention.
Solution
The Goat Trust’s (TGT) innovation is to build an aggregative business of support services for profitable goat farming, which will enable smallholder women goat farmers to transform their business from subsistence to significance. Since goat farming is primarily managed by women farmers and institutionalized into producer organizations, by leveraging remunerative market linkages, higher income can be achieved. TGT, in partnership with 100% women-led farmer producer organizations has worked on technical innovations (breeding/ feed & health), financial innovations (goat bank – leasing of goats, livestock credit card, community-based goat insurance), product innovations (goat milk soap/cosmetics, liquid goat-milk supply chain) and trading innovations (developing live body weight pricing and building digital livestock).
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