Nutreco contributes funds and expertise to an EPIA project in the remote Patuakali district in the southern delta region of Bangladesh. EPIA stands for Empowerment of the Poor through Integrated Agriculture. The focus of the project is to stimulate development by supporting basic agriculture and pond aquaculture. The objective over five years is to recruit 3,000 families with a potential benefit for 100,000 people in the region.

The concept is simple but effective. The local organisation in Bangladesh recruited 10 field workers. These are educated people with knowledge of agriculture and or aquaculture and are familiar with the area. Their initial task is to identify and recruit families to the scheme. A family in this instance is defined as a group of people ‘eating from the same pot' and there is a particular focus of families headed by a woman. Where the family is motivated and competent, micro-finance can be arranged to pay for digging or restoration of a pond, or building a poultry house or vegetable patch and for purchase of fingerlings, chicks or seeds. The three activities can integrate, for example by using the chicken manure as fertiliser. As these families feed themselves better and have products to sell, their success encourages others to join. At the same time the activities bring new business to local suppliers. It is calculated that 3,000 families can directly benefit their 20,000 members and indirectly some 100,000 people.

In addition to finance, Nutreco specialists visit the project to provide training for the field workers to pass on to the families they recruited. The project is being implemented by an NGO called SLOPB-Bangladesh, which is led by Motalib Weijters who was a street child in Bangladesh before being adopted into a Dutch family.