Assalammualaikum wr wb,
We hope you are in the best of health and iman and we hope that Syawal have been great
for you and your family.
We were approached by Aaliyah's Pte Ltd to run local Qurban since last year September 2022. Initially the plan was to run it independently as Aaliyah had done it in 2021 at Hay Dairies Farm and 2022 at Al Wehdah, Arab Association
despite the pandemic. They shared that it came with many challenges and it also came at a cost as they are only able to have less than 200 animals.
A few months back while scouting for locations, MUIS came out requesting for tender for this years Qurban. However
the tender requirements were specifically for "Modified Qurban" with an option to do Qurban locally at 5 mosques.
What is "Modified Qurban"?
This is the term used for doing Qurban and slaughtering the animals in Australia and the meat
or carcuss will be flown here by plane.
Since we had been planning to do the local Qurban for many months, we still proposed to MUIS for the "Modified Qurban" together with the "Local Qurban".
Reason being we wanted to do it at a Mosque and to do so, we will need MUIS approval. In fact we did our recce and found 2 locations to be suitable for the operations which is at Masjid Petempatan Melayu Sembawang and Masjid Al-Firdaus at Choa Chu Kang.
Getting the Tender
Just before Hari Raya this year, MUIS announced
the winners and we manage to get the tender for the "Local Qurban". As of today, only Aaliyah's Pte Ltd is awarded to do the "Local Qurban" but there are 2 other vendors that was awarded the "Modified Qurban".
Local Supply is Limited
In the tender proposal, one of the source of livestock that we are able to get is from Hay Dairies Farm which is located at Lim Chu Kang Road. Since they supported the Qurban operations for Aaliyah the last 2 years and it is among the animals that is approved by SFA (
Singapore Food Authority ) for slaughtering and consumption, we continue to support them and it will be one of the packages. However the supply is limited to 180 goats for this year.
Australian Supply
One of the reasons that we were
able to get the tender is because we have a partnership with Dr Michael from ALTA. Dr Michael is a trained vet and is familiar with the exportation and importation process of sheep to Singapore.
Furthermore the Australian government require a Qurban operator to
have the ESCAS ( Exporter Supply Chain Assurance System ) license which many organisations may not have renewed it for the last 2 years just because they didn't do the Qurban.
Hence Aaliyah's Pte Ltd maybe the only local Qurban player in Singapore today who are able to do it this year.
Even so we are playing it safe and base on 2 Mosque operational capacity we target to bring in 800 to 1200 sheep from Australia.
This is a far number from
the Pre-Covid time because back then more than 20 mosques were able to handle the Qurban operations and there were 3000-6000 sheep brought in. Hence it will take about a year or so for other organisation to be operationally ready again ( We may be wrong ).
Hence where do we come in?
To scale up and reach more of our community, Aaliyah needed a media and technology partner to help them with marketing and sales.
Hence this project is a partnership between these 3 parties.
