Surviving the Ill-Wishers - Profiles on Farmers using KUKUSTAR

Margaret Mboizi is a veteran user of our KUKUSTAR thermostable Newcastle Disease (ND) vaccine. She lives in a village called Bulangira in Eastern Uganda and is a 38-year-old poultry farmer in a household that accommodates eight people. She first started using the vaccine back in 2012, and although she has had a lot of success, her journey has not been easy because she has had to deal with ill-wishers trying to sabotage her poultry-keeping practice along the way. 

Early in our distribution and pilot testing, Margaret was one of the few farmers who had the initiative to get involved early and she began vaccinating her chickens. Although others thought it was too much of a risk to use a new and relatively unknown vaccine on their poultry, she believed it could make a difference and so invested in the health of her chickens.

Her early investment paid off and in just a couple of months, Margaret quickly saw the population of her free-range birds increase from just a few birds to 250.She then began to periodically sell off some of the mature birds as new crops of chicks hatched so as to create room for the new chicks   Now, two years later, the turn-over of bird population in her household has risen enough for her to go as far as sending one of her children to university. In fact, over the 2013 Christmas holidays alone, she was able to sell chickens worth 450,000 UGX ($180). In addition to her poultry, Margaret now has cows and goats as well that she was able to acquire from the sale of chickens. Yet the neighbours who had not vaccinated their birds, lost them when an ND outbreak came.

Her success became an inspiration for her neighbours and other family members who began to visit her in the morning and evening to ask how she had done so well. Her response was, and still is, always the same; KUKUSTAR. During these visits, she would talk to them about the importance of vaccinating their birds and rearing them properly. 

However, not all her neighbours wished her well. Indeed Margaret recounts an incident where one neighbour who never vaccinated his birds decided to throw over the edge separating the two homes offals (intestines) of dead chickens with the intention that Margaret’s chicken would eat them and also fall sick and die. Margaret’s children watched all this and reported to the mother. But to the surprise of both Margaret and the neighbour her flock of birds did not fall sick or die even after eating the infected offals of her neighbour’s dead birds. This was a huge shock to her neighbour who, after witnessing this, was now completely convinced that the vaccine worked and asked to buy one of Margaret’s vaccinated hens. She accepted his request and since then, her neighbour, and the rest of the community, have embraced KUKUSTAR. 

With all her experience and success, Margaret now educates the community on the proper practices for poultry keeping and, in addition to being a successful poultry farmer, she has now become a vaccinator for her neighbours, who give her the money to buy and vaccinate their birds for them. Margaret is the perfect example of how an innovative animal health solution, like KUKUSTAR, can help a rural farmer improve the livelihoods of the people in his/her household. Furthermore, for women like Margaret who are able to invest the limited time they have on free-range poultry keeping because of its low-maintenance, it is a way for them to become financially independent while also being seen as valuable contributors and members of their households.