In 2020, with assistance from FAO and funding from the European Union, displaced and vulnerable communities of Gendrassa and other villages in Maban County finally found the support they needed.

Every day Mary Liango keeps a busy routine. In the morning, she cleans up the compound, attends her poultry and fetches water from a new borehole. In the afternoon, Mary goes to collect lalob and other wild fruits from the forest, she processes them and sells the product at the evening market nearby along with the poultry products – her main source of income.

“When I get home, the first thing I do is check my chicken,” says Mary while pointing at the door. “It has to be well locked otherwise mongooses and wild cats enter and hurt them.”

Mary, 65, lives with her son, his wife and their three children in Gendarrasa, a village, near Maban. Only one year ago, Mary’s routine was made of danger, fear and deprivation. In the Maban area, endowed with four rivers, the main economic activity used to be fishing and farming, but due to conflict and widespread insecurity, many residents had to run away from the violence. They lost all their belongings and their main economic activities halted.

Like many others, Mary and her family had no choice but to leave their home to avoid death “We left all our things behind and lost the ones we carried with us while we ran”, she said.

In 2020, with assistance from FAO displaced and vulnerable communities of Gendrassa and other villages in Maban County finally found the support they needed. Through a project funded by the European Union aimed at empowering agro-pastoralist communities in cross-border areas of South Sudan, FAO supported 30 displaced families to increase their income from raising and selling live chickens and poultry products.  

Mary and her family also attended training and learned how to manage the animals and build improved poultry houses using locally available materials. As a precondition to receiving five chickens – four hens and one rooster – to kick-off their new farm, each family had to construct an improved poultry house, which was then quality checked by FAO livestock experts.

As poultry diseases, including the deadly Newcastle virus, spread fast after flooding and are a major threat for communities, the training also allowed Mary to monitor the health of her chicken and to detect early the signs of disease. “I got the skills I needed to feed the chicken properly and take good care of them,” says Mary proudly, “and if I have an emergency, I know who I have to call.”

Mary has been able to move with her chicken whenever there was insecurity in the area. “The last time we were forced to abandon our place, my priority was taking all my chicken with me,” she said. In her new place, Mary sells her chickens to buy food and other items.

Since she started receiving assistance, the living standards of Mary’s family have significantly improved. Instead of relying only on lalob revenues – which she hasn’t stopped processing and selling – with poultry farming, Mary can now afford what she could not buy before, “I was so poor I didn’t even have the money for soap”, she recalls.

In addition to training, Mary also received crop and vegetable seeds. Living in an area rich in fertile lands and ideal to grow crops and vegetables like Maban County, Mary quickly set up her garden and is now growing amaranth, collard and pumpkin as well as maize, sorghum and cowpeas – all products she is selling at the market nearby.

“I can now cook healthy meals for my grandchildren,” she happily says hypnotized by the chicken roaming next to her bountiful vegetable garden.

"My family and other communities will become wealthy as soon as peace becomes the new normal," concludes Mary on a hopeful note.

The European Union (EU) is one of the biggest and long-lasting contributors to FAO in South Sudan. With the project Strengthening the resilience of pastoral and agro-pastoral communities in South Sudan’s cross-border areas with Sudan, Ethiopia, Kenya and Uganda, the EU helps FAO promote sustainable livelihoods for vulnerable populations by improving household food security, nutrition and income of South Sudanese. In this framework, in the last three years, the project supported 1 180 farming families in Maban County providing them different inputs for income-generating activities.