© 2012 -
This programme is based on the assumption that it is sufficient to give a male goat
in order to bring milk to a whole community. However, goat keeping is never 100%;
there are always some households which have no goats -
Actually, there are several mechanisms
It is not necessary to start with a full-
In many areas there is a well established cultural principal that someone who has no goat can borrow one from a relative, and then the kids born are shared between the borrower and the lender. Sometimes the lender is not a relative but a neighbour that sees a commercial opportunity in breeding crossbred goats but does not have the resources to rear as many as they would like. So they lend out one of their breeding females as a way of maintaining or expanding their herd, without entailing more mouths to feed.
Despite the above mechanisms, there are sometimes situations where there really aren’t
enough local goats. This may be due to a period of drought or war. In such cases,
a larger NGO may distribute indigenous goats or low-
Often, the reason that households do not have goats is not that they have no way to get them, but rather that the goats do not give sufficient return to make it worth doing so. If it is possible to improve the returns from the goat through breeding better animals, then more people find ways of taking up goat keeping.