As extremely poor families often fail to successfully graduate out of poverty with their single income source, adopting multiple income-generating activities (IGAs) helps them have uninterrupted income gains, build increased and faster assets and scale up promising or successful IGAs to graduate from their impoverished condition. This approach of income diversification also helps these households to improve their capabilities, absorb shock and be resilient against climatic odds and prosper.
PPEPP-EU offers its members ‘Prosperity Bari (House)’ for multiple sources of income and helps scale up their successful IGAs for steady income gains. Prosperity Bari is a model house displaying at least seven types of IGAs to generate home-based food production and sustained income from multiple sources to break the poverty cycle.
Josna Khatun (32) is a member from Munshiganj upazila of Satkihira district, an area known for its multifaceted natural disasters such as salinity, tidal surge and storm. She is one of them who turned her household into a Prosperity Bari with grants, skills training and technical support from the PPEPP-EU project. Before becoming a PPEPP-EU member, she had no capital to start a homestead-based IGA and would often face financial hardships in times of crisis.
While her Prosperity Bari was being made, she received skill development training on chicken and duck rearing and fish culture. In her Prosperity Bari, she received chickens, goats, pigeons, ducks, fish fry, seeds, and a sewing machine and started earning on a small scale.
She learned to manage her IGAs over time and took out a BDT 20,000 loan to expand them. Now, Josna has 13 native chickens, 18 goats, 14 pigeons, 76 ducks, and a fish pond at her home, all contributing to her income gains.
Josna and her husband, Bazlur Rahman, cultivate various vegetables, fruits, and spices and prepare vermicompost. They also run a sewing machine and a shop in front of their house. Until now, they have been making around BDT 30,000 monthly from their diversified income sources from their homestead alone. Besides, multiple IGA not only increased their income but also increased year-round supply of fresh nutritious sources of vegetables, egg, meat, milk and fish. Her garden is also a source of fun and aspiration for her household as well as for neighbors.
‘I never thought my house would be full of livelihood opportunities. But this project has built that belief in me and now I know I can grow with many IGA options’, said Josna, smiling. Applying this model, PPEPP-EU has established 346 Prosperity Bari across its 145 working unions in 12 districts.
A short study conducted by PPEPP-EU to assess the income growth in these households shows Prosperity Bari members are doing better than their counterparts in general households (control households) having a single income source, both in terms of average and per capita income and expenditure across the working areas. Many, like Josna, in her community and beyond followed her and made their houses a resource for multiple livelihood options.