Four goats and a fresh start

Bishnumaya Dumja lives with her husband and three sons in a village in Sarlahi, a district in Nepal’s Terai region. The family are part of a marginalized ethnic community and live on unassigned, government-owned land.

Bishnumaya, who is 31 years old and legally blind, is an active contributor to her family’s finances. In 2018, the family received four goat kids from the Government of Nepal. They were among 200 from across Sarlahi, Saptari and Siraha districts to receive livestock through the government’s Chure livelihood improvement programme. RECOFTC Nepal provided the necessary technical backstopping, supporting capacity development trainings for recipients on developing business plans, running businesses and linking communities to markets.

In 2019, after rearing the goats for a year, Bishnumaya sold them for NPR 65,000 (approximately USD 430). That money paid off her family’s debts, and she bought a buffalo calf with the remaining amount. She raised the calf and sold it for NPR 101,000 (approximately USD 665) in 2021.

Bishnumaya and her husband, Aaitesingh, used most of this money NPR 85,000, (approximately USD 560) to repair and rebuild the temporary shelter the family had been living in. They added their savings to the remaining sum and purchased four buffalo calves to raise and sell.

Aaitesingh continues to gather firewood from the local forest area and sell it in the local market. This money was all that the family could rely on before Bishnumaya received the goat kids through the government programme. Aaitesingh can repair bicycles but cannot seek employment far from home given Bisnumaya’s blindness. He believes that if the family had some land on which he could set up a bicycle repair shop, they could improve their financial situation further. 

While the family is unsure about if or when they might be able to gain land security, the changes in their household have been modest but consistent over the years. What began with four goat kids has given them a reliable source of income and a sense of control over their future.

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Niraj Babu Bhatta is senior programme officer at RECOFTC Nepal.