Let's say Bill Gates didn't wake up each morning with a net worth of more than $76 billion.
Let's say he had just $2. What would the founder of Microsoft do then?
"Just about anyone who's living in extreme poverty is better off if they have chickens," Gates wrote in a recent Gates Notes blog post.
That's right. He'd raise chickens.
By Gates' calculations, the animals cost just $5 in most West African countries. So by spending $2 a day, he could feasibly assemble a flock of 12 chickens in about a month (if he devoted all his money to that goal). Several months later, he'd have dozens of chicks to raise into full-grown money-making machines — and that would put him above the poverty line by a wide margin.
Gates wants to help families in need do just that. In the blog post, he points to his recent partnership with Heifer International, a charity that donates livestock in an effort to combat poverty around the world.
"Our foundation is betting on chickens," Gates writes. "Our goal: to eventually help 30 percent of the rural families in sub-Saharan Africa raise improved breeds of vaccinated chickens, up from just 5 percent now."
The birds offer a cheap and easy way for poor families to dramatically increase their income, since they can sell, trade, or eat the meat, or use live chickens as currency to pay for tools or services.
"These chickens are multiplying on an ongoing basis, so there's no investment that has a return percentage anything like being able to breed chickens," Gates told reporters at a recent event about the partnership, which is called Coop Dreams.
He references the old parable of teaching a man to fish rather than just giving him one. "The parable could've been stated in terms of giving somebody a chicken," Gates says.
As long as farmers keep their chickens healthy — vaccines for the deadly Newcastle disease cost just 20 cents, Gates points out — they can use the revenue to finance purchases of larger livestock, such as cows or goats.
Like chickens, these animals offer year-round yields. Instead of waiting on crops to come back into season, farmers can use eggs, milk, and meat as steady streams of income — not to mention nutrition. If someone like Gates were raising a family on a very low income, he explains, chickens could provide cognitive benefits to children whose brains are still developing.
"Malnutrition kills more than 3.1 million children a year," he writes. "If a farmer's flock is big enough to give her extra eggs, or if she ends up with a few broken ones, she may decide to cook them for her family."
So while $2 might not sound like much, the right entrepreneurial spirit and training could turn a few chickens into a real shot at self-sufficiency.
