Creating Agents of Change – Project WELD

Women Empowerment through Livestock Development

WELD, was our flagship project which started in 2011 in collaboration with USAID and was completed in 2013. The project aimed at maximizing the dairy value chain by enhancing livestock management, milk collection and entrepreneurship skills of females from seven rural districts in upper Sindh and Punjab. Under this program, we partnered in a mission with USAID and with facilitation of MEDA Pakistan, to strengthen the socio-economic fabric of its primary milk producing communities. The objective was to empower women to become “Agents of Change” within their communities. Project WELD aimed to boost livestock production and enhance milk production by developing the technical know-how of livestock management skills of women entrepreneurs, and thus improving their earning potential. Under the WELD platform, we handpicked and trained 250 Female Village Milk Collectors (FVMC), and 322 Female Livestock Extension Workers (FLEW) who in turn trained 18,682 milk producers in 533 villages. More than 65% of those who received training claimed that their animal production increased by 0.98 liters of milk per animal per day & the overall revenue generated from increased yield was in excess of PKR 266+ million. These Agents of Change, to date, provide active advisory services to other female livestock owners and milk collectors in various fields of better animal husbandry practices, artificial insemination techniques, farm supervisory, basic health, nutrition & vaccination services, milk collection and livestock extension. We were highly appreciated for project WELD on creating an extremely sophisticated mechanism to empower the rurally entrenched dairy value chain. This dairy value chain empowers more than 250,000+ dairy farmers on a daily basis. We also received an award as Commonwealth Company of the year 2018 in recognition of creating a large scale impact for providing sustainable livelihood to farmers.