Solving the "last-mile problem" of Nigeria’s rural poultry farmers

Most rural households across Nigeria keep chickens. The birds provide even the poorest families with both much-needed cash income and nourishing food. But these millions of rural smallholder and backyard chicken farmers face a major problem: they struggle to get hold of healthy day-old chicks—the starter stock that is the foundation of any poultry enterprise.

Most of the hatcheries producing day-old chicks in Nigeria are concentrated in the southwest of the country, far from farmers in other regions, especially in the north and east, who are forced to travel up to 10 hours to find chicks to buy. Such distances raise costs and stress and weaken the birds, with many chicks dying on the journey.

This "last-mile" problem is one of the most critical bottlenecks in Nigeria’s poultry system—and one that mostly affects the poorest farmers, many of whom are women. Such farmers also have to contend with high chicken feed costs, fluctuating market prices, and deadly outbreaks of poultry diseases. Together, these obstacles are preventing Nigeria’s rural poultry farmers from building viable businesses.

To help people in major farming nations lift themselves out of poverty, it’s smart to start with the assets people already have and build from there. Across Nigeria, even the poorest households raise a few chickens. That, other than human ingenuity, ambition, and muscle, is their major asset.
—Ijudai Jasada, ILRI innovation and scaling expert

Bringing the chicken hatchery closer to the farmer

One solution would be simply to bring the country’s chick production closer to its rural farmers. Instead of farmers having to rely on a few large hatcheries far from their communities, a network of community-level hatcheries could be located in the country’s underserved rural regions.

This is the solution being piloted by a research project known as the (uncatchy) "Sustainable Decentralized Dual-purpose Chick and Input Supply Delivery System", or DDCDS. The simple shift from centralized to decentralized chick production, the research shows, has true transformative potential. By shortening the distance between hatchery and farm, transport time and costs drop dramatically and chicks arrive on farms alive and healthy.

Crucially, these hatcheries would act as local "service hubs", not only supplying the farmers with day-old chicks but also connecting them to affordable feed, veterinary services, poultry training, and financial credit. Another key feature is the project’s focus on "dual-purpose" chickens—hardy native breeds improved by geneticists and developed to produce both meat and eggs. While consumer and farmer demand for these breeds is rising across Nigeria, supply has not kept pace. Linking community hatcheries with local farmers producing fertile eggs fixes that.

And the benefits of such a model extend beyond individual farmers. Decentralizing hatcheries by necessity creates new business opportunities, especially for women and young people, with new jobs opening for hatchery operators and technicians, for feed suppliers and transporters, for vets and market sellers.

Bringing solutions to those that need them

A day in the life of a Nigerian chicken farmer in Kaduna State

Every day at dawn, a chicken farmer steps outside her mud-brick house and walks across an earthen courtyard to a small wire-mesh chicken coop to water a dozen clucking birds and scatter local grains and cassava peels among them. She counts her birds, checking them for signs of sickness and looking for chicks too weak to stand, and collects any eggs her hens have laid that night in the bare earth.

After making her family tea and porridge, she sweeps the chicken droppings out of the coop and spreads fresh bedding on the floor. Midmorning, she carefully packs a handful of eggs to carry to her local market to sell. The egg money she gets, and the occasional chicken she sells, help to pay for school fees—and for soap, cooking oil, medicines, batteries or airtime.

Back at home, as she turns to other farm chores—tilling, weeding, and watering her family’s cassava, maize, bean, or vegetable plots—her chickens scratch the earth around her. She watches the sky for hawks as well as rain. Mostly she watches for signs of the dreaded poultry Newcastle disease. (One dead bird means lost income; a dozen dead can spell disaster—children pulled from school, undernourished toddlers, drug treatments stopped.)

In the afternoon heat, she moves panting birds into shade, brings them more water, and may feed them crushed garlic, herbs, or other traditional medicines. At dusk, she waters and feeds them again, counts them again, and collects their eggs again. After cooking her family dinner, she checks the roosting chickens one last time with her torch (predators hunt at night) before sleeping.

This daily mundane routine of hers is a model of constrained resourcefulness and industry, combining, as it does, bookkeeping without paper, veterinary care without training, logistics without transport, and business management without capital.

Across rural Nigeria, this woman and tens of millions of others like her are not just raising chickens. They are holding their households together, one bird and one egg at a time.

A "Scaling Readiness" workshop to take research innovations to scale

The CGIAR’s unique "Scaling Readiness" protocol flips traditional research from "innovate first, scale later" to: (1) Determine the potential bottlenecks to scaling an innovation early in the innovation process by (2) convening a meeting of all the major stakeholders in implementing that solution; and together with those diverse stakeholders (3) build realistic pathways for scaling that innovation in a specific context.

Too many promising solutions to agricultural problems get stuck in their pilot phases (dubbed the "valley of death") because the researchers developing the solutions are unable to secure the wider partnerships, capacities, and investments needed to reach people at scale. To change that, we’re going to have to move those innovations along a pathway to impacts. That’s the premise of a systematic and evidenced-based approach to scaling innovations developed and used by CGIAR called "Scaling Readiness".
—Edwin Kang’ethe, CGIAR scaling and innovation expert

The International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) recently convened an Innovation Package and Scaling Readiness (IPSR) workshop in Ibadan to co-develop and refine the DDCDS model with key stakeholders. Because it takes a whole system—research, finance, logistics , local enterprise—to deliver healthy chicks to rural farmers, the workshop brought together hatchery operators and breeders, feed producers and vets, chick transporters and poultry geneticists, government agencies and policymakers, microfinance institutions and agricultural extension services, and business advisors and non-governmental organizations.

The workshop expertly guided the participants through a structured process to determine potential bottlenecks the project could face and ways to resolve them as well as what "enablers"—the conditions, capacities, institutions, incentives, and support systems—would help the innovation scale successfully and sustainably. The participants then together developed a phased implementation roadmap for the project.

By scaling this "decentralized" model, the project team estimates that Nigeria’s rural poultry productivity can be increased by 20–30% within the next three years. By 2030, ILRI and its partners aim to operationalize the DDCDS model across five Nigerian states, establishing 15 decentralized delivery systems and directly engage 1,500 farm households. The model is expected to generate approximately 6,000 jobs through hatchery operations and node-level activities along the broader value chain. In addition, the intervention seeks to expand access to affordable meat and eggs for 200,000 households in peri-urban communities.

Nigeria does not lack demand for poultry. Nor does it lack farmers willing to raise chickens. What it lacks is a system that delivers the right inputs, in the right places, at the right times. The DDCDS approach addresses these gaps directly. By bringing chick hatcheries and poultry inputs closer to the country’s farming communities, we can build more inclusive and efficient supply chains that in turn create more reliable pathways out of poverty.
—Adebola Adebayo, ILRI technology transfer specialist