Small-scale family poultry farming is practised by a large proportion of smallholder families in the rural and peri-urban areas of most of the world’s developing countries. By enabling improvements in disease control, breeding and genetics, and management and nutrition through smallholder poultry development projects which incorporate a participatory farming approach, value chain assessment and appropriately focused training and extension programmes, such projects have the potential to impact very meaningfully on poverty alleviation, household nutrition and food security, the health and education of children and the empowerment of women as the principal poultry keepers. These outcomes constitute a number of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.