Heifer Project International, Inc. HQ

We’re on a mission to end hunger and poverty in a sustainable way by supporting and investing alongside local farmers and their communities.

• Community Mobilization — When we start a project, participants form a local self-help group, together with other people from their community. In some places, these groups already exist, and the group members decide to link up with one of our projects. Each group contains 20-25 people and meets at least once a month. Together, they save money and build a central fund that’s used to invest in the growth of each other’s businesses. As the savings increase and the groups strengthen, with specialized support from our field staff, members agree on rules about how to run the group and identify business areas with potential to boost their incomes. Our teams and partners work and invest alongside the farmers as they grow their businesses. Support from Heifer can include the provision of seeds, livestock and other agricultural supplies, or connections to financing and animal wellbeing experts.

• Training — While subsistence farming provides goods and nutrition for a time, an active marketplace creates incomes, savings, education, employment and opportunities for communities to retain their people and develop new skills and further earning potential. We provide training and support from local experts as farmers scale up production and sales. Scaling up production can bring extra costs and greater risks for smaller businesses, but with the right training and support, new processes can be adopted that make better use of available resources. For livestock projects, improved animal management is a key part of increasing yields.

• Access to Markets — We connect farmers to robust markets so they can sell their goods for fair prices. At the beginning of any project, farmers identify opportunities to increase their incomes within different value chains, together with our local staff. Private sector partnerships also play an important role. In Mexico, our country team connected farmers in our Rural Entrepreneurs project with restaurant group Toks, providing them with a stable market for their free-range eggs.

Since 1944, we’ve worked alongside more than 39 million families as they build sustainable farming businesses. Our work has always focused on farming, because we believe ending poverty begins with agriculture. Cows, goats, chickens and seeds can provide nutritious milk, meat, eggs, food, fodder and so much more for communities living in hunger and poverty.

We work in 21 countries around the world alongside local farmers and business owners. We support farmers and their communities as they mobilize and envision their futures, provide training so they can improve the quantity and quality of the goods they produce, and connections to market to increase sales and incomes. Our model serves as a platform for other partnerships and support.

Our work areas include:

Economic Development — We work with farmers and their communities to identify opportunities that deliver living incomes, creating solutions to local challenges that are designed to build inclusive, resilient economies. And we partner with local NGOs to maximize our impact and interface with local governments to unlock additional funding as a leverage to our investment, and the investments made by communities themselves. Additionally, we deploy our own capital and technology, alongside farmers and private sector partners who share our values.

Environmental Sustainability — We promote agroecology and work with farmers to protect local ecosystems and biodiversity, deploy soil and water conservation techniques, and reduce carbon footprints. Our expert staff work with farmers as they integrate climate-smart agricultural practices on their farms to increase resilience and crop production.

Food Security and Nutrition — We work with farmers to improve productivity, diversify their businesses and increase incomes. With a living income they can provide quality food for themselves and their families.

Risk Mitigation and Resilience — We help people forge the first connections so that they can shift from subsistence to sustainability – from reliance on others to resilience. We test new technologies, assess their impact and share them with communities, through farmer-to-farmer connections and the work of Heifer Labs. Our commitment to monitoring and evaluation enables us to draw learnings from across all our projects.

Women's Empowerment and Social Capital — We support women to improve their products and sell them for higher prices. We work with them to build their confidence so they can find new markets for their goods, and make their voices heard in their communities. And we connect them to other farmers, business owners and entrepreneurs to build inclusive markets that create new opportunities for others. Because when they have their own sources of income and can decide how their money is spent, the impact on their families and communities is truly transformational.

Since 2015, we have focused our work on supporting farmers to build businesses that provide them with a living income. In the last five years, 3.39 million families have reached a living income or are on the pathway with our support. We work in 21 countries around the world alongside local farmers and business owners. We support farmers and their communities as they mobilize and envision their futures, provide training so they can improve the quantity and quality of the goods they produce, and connections to market to increase sales and incomes.