Meeting a need through donor-funded grant program in Africa
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More than 8,000 miles from the University’s Omaha campus, Creighton President the Rev. Daniel S. Hendrickson, SJ, PhD, walked into a chicken coop in the Kakuma refugee camp of northwest Kenya to learn the finer points of raising poultry and selling eggs.
These 70 chickens provide a living for Abraham (pictured above), a 28-year-old Sudanese native and the owner of Hong Kong Poultry Farm. (Hong Kong is a neighborhood in the Kakuma camp.) The chickens’ eggs — which go for 15 Kenyan shillings (or about 10 cents) a piece — offer a valuable resource to Abraham’s food-insecure community.
“These eggs are fertile and organic and also very nutritious,” he says. “We believe this will solve the problem of nutrition. Although not for everybody, even if two or three families can buy eggs every day, we believe that a problem is solved.”
Hong Kong Poultry Farm is one of a dozen businesses to be funded through the Creighton Innovation Grants awarded in 2023. The grant program was established by Creighton donors to support startup businesses in African refugee camps.
All grant recipients are students or graduates of Jesuit Worldwide Learning (JWL), a program that has provided online higher education courses to individuals in refugee camps around the world since 2010. Along with other members of the Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities, Creighton faculty members teach JWL students thousands of miles from campus.
