From the Field

Contact: Richard Fritz | WPF Managing Director

Stone Mountain, Ga. – With a goal of training 200 poultry producers in record-keeping and financial management, and teaching them how to create financial documents to apply for bank loans, the World Poultry Foundation (WPF) successfully hosted the first of a planned series of financial workshops, Aug. 20-24, 2018, for small and mid-sized disadvantaged South African poultry producers.Management consulting firm Franchising Plus of Pretoria coordinated the recent workshop, with the support of NedBank, the South African Department of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries (DAFF) and Limpopo provincial agricultural staff. Officials from DAFF and the provincial government observed all financial presentations.

The city of Mokopane provided the venue for the training, which also was supported by a grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).

WPF Managing Director Richard Fritz attended the five-day workshop.

“The workshop was limited to 25 producers to increase interaction and to allow participants one-on-one assistance with questions,” Fritz said. “In addition to learning more about general accounting and management practices, farmers utilized their own production records and income and expense information to establish balance sheets and cost and income projections for their own operations.”

Franchising Plus instructor Annie Baptiste led the training sessions and received high marks from Fritz.

“Annie Baptiste had all participants engaged, laughing, working together, discussing their own operations, and sharing stories about the good and bad of the financial issues on their own farms,” Fritz said, “We did not lose a single participant in five days of the workshop.”

After each day’s training, workbooks were revised for the next day based on specific feedback from attendees. Although the written training materials were not poultry-specific, Baptiste included poultry in every aspect of the workshop.

“The morale created in this environment kept people excited to work out the accounting and record-keeping tasks presented to them,” Fritz said.

At the end, Baptiste provided workbooks and other materials to DAFF and provincial agriculture officials so they could be prepared to assist local producers if they encountered problems with record-keeping.

In an evaluation, the farmers rated the training highly, Fritz said. Participants were particularly complimentary of presentations by NedBank on what banks look for in loan applications, and on its explanation of several government programs that could assist poultry producers.

DAFF also organized visits to local poultry farms during the week, and producers also toured a small-scale abattoir, he said.

Next January, Fritz said that WPF will organize a follow-up event with each farmer to evaluate how well they have maintained their production and expense records and if they have been utilizing the financial tools presented to them.

About the World Poultry Foundation

The World Poultry Foundation (WPF) is a non-profit organization founded in 1997 whose mission is to help solve hunger and poverty issues and promote economic development in distressed areas and emerging markets outside the United States through the production and consumption of poultry by empowering farmers in developing regions.