Positive futures are being born in this chicken shed in rural Burkina Faso.

Thanks to a small micro credit loan, Isaac Gumbiou now has a successful chicken breeding business, one that is generating the money his family needs to send his children to school.

Isaac has lived in Ratyiri, a remote community in the north west of the country, for 50 years.  As a small scale subsistence farmer for most of that time, he regularly struggled to generate any spare cash from what his land produced to pay for things like medicines or school uniforms for his family, but the chickens have changed all that.

With the loan he received Isaac started to buy in young chicks, breed them, and sell the adult chickens at the local market, where there is always high demand.  The money he has earned means he can now afford to put all his children through school, but he still has further plans.

He tells us that prices at the local market for chickens are not as high as in the main towns and he, along with other local producers, are investigating ways in which they can work together to sell directly into the towns to increase their profit.

Inspired by success stories like Isaac, we are now launching a larger micro credit programme.  Could you help us to offer more small loans to more people like Isaac, helping then to work their way out of poverty?