Kyaffe Farmers Coffee is a Ugandan social business whose vision is dedicated to advancing the lives of female coffee farmers and their children through rural wealth creation and community transformation. Kyaffe is a Luganda word meaning "ours" which symbolizes communalism and working together as one. For the past three years we have been working relentlessly to empower and organize smallholders using the farmer ownership model and getting women increasingly more involved in our value chain.
Elizabeth Nalugemwa grew up on a coffee plantation in central Uganda in a place called Masaka. Her mother was a smallholder coffee farmer. Her efforts to generate an income for our family were deemed a threat by my father and that led to domestic violence and their eventual separation. Elizabeth witnessed her mother end up losing all she had. As a result of her struggles.
While women smallholder farmers play a crucial role in growing and preparing ingredients for many global products, their contribution is often unrecognized, unpaid and invisible. In many cases, women provide the majority of agricultural labor, yet transporting crops to market and sales are largely done by men. This creates barriers for women in terms of both income and leadership.
In SINA in 2017 Kyaffee Farmers Coffee was born and was able to acquire its own coffee farm in 2019. In the communities where Kyaffe Farmers Coffee operates, women and children lack vital educational, economical and health-related support services that often lead them into risky situations for survival such as early marriage, pregnancy and sex work. The consequences of such actions include gender-based violence, dropping out of school, drug abuse, sexually-transmitted infections/HIV and a perpetuated cycle of poverty and oppression.
In response to these issues, Kyaffee developed programs with the overall aim to tackle pervasive gender inequality and to see societal transformation by creating sustainable livelihoods for these women. Coffee is one of the world’s most traded commodities with Uganda being a top producer.
Kyaffe currently purchases coffee at fair trade prices from 50 cooperatives consisting of 1.500 farmers. The team is also working with farmers to process an alternative to charcoal, a briquette made from waste coffee grounds that they themselves can make and sell and use in their own homes instead of contributing to deforestation.
