Bill Gates is excited about chickens. Seeing as it is Gates, you might expect it to be a cyborg chicken, or at least a GMO chicken, but as far as I can tell it is just normal chickens. The Gates Foundation has partnered with Heifer International to distribute 100,000 chickens, mostly in sub-saharan Africa, but also in Bolivia. Heifer is the master NGO when it comes to scaling up animal-based agriculture for improved food production and poverty alleviation. See, for example, two papers on their work here and here.

I guess it is not surprising that the initiative has been criticized. The Gates Foundation is so big and powerful and attracts so much attention that they will be criticized by somebody (including me) for everything. My favourite blog has come out swinging against Gates, but I have not found enough information on the Gates chicken program to enable a thorough assessment and evaluation.

There are many good reasons to work with chickens with poorer farmers and these reasons were behind our efforts to promote chicken-raising in the highlands of Bolivia.

While there is work to be done on figuring out how to make it a long term sustainable and scalable venture, there is scope for significant nutrition and food security gains through chickens. Which makes the Bolivian government's rejection of the Gates initiative curious. I believe Bolivia's development minister when he says the country can produce industrial chickens, but the farmers we worked with in the isolated mountain communities don’t have easy access to chickens, and some of the Gates money could be put to good use to help the small farmers raise a few chickens to improve household diets. Hmm. Maybe I should give ol’ Bill a call.