We are pleased to report that Endiro Growers Uganda has now completed our third year of growing coffee in Eastern Uganda.  Recently we conducted a field survey of our ongoing coffee growing project in the village of Bukalasi (Bududa District, Uganda) to gauge our progress.  The results, testimonies and newfound hope for the future are simply breathtaking.  We are humbled to be a part of this profound work that is changing so many lives in such dramatic ways and we are extremely grateful for everyone from the farmer to the coffee drinker who with every bean and every cup is making the Endiro vision become a reality. 

As a reminder, our vision is to be a company that partners with others to end child vulnerability globally through coffee and its people, related products, profits, services, spaces and stories.

Exponential Growth of Coffee Production and Income Generation

In last year’s report, we cited a Lehigh University study that found that the average coffee farming family in the Bududa District of Uganda earns about $100 per year through their crops.  Since coffee has long been the primary cash crop for farmers living in this area, it is safe to assume that most families are thus living off between $50-200 per year or about 25-50 cents per day per household.  Keeping in mind that the World Bank has set the “international poverty line” at $1.90 per person per day, we recognize that poverty in Bududa is extreme.

We began growing coffee together with the farming families of Bukalasi in the 2015-16 season with three core principles:  

1) Ignoring global market prices, we would pay 8,000 UGX per kilo of coffee, without exception.  

2) We would train and equip the farmers so that they could perform initial processing (floating, pulping, washing, drying) so that we could achieve a specialty grade coffee.

3) We would do everything in the context of genuine relationship.

Since that beginning point, we have invested large amounts of money (which we don’t really have) and even larger amounts of time to train and equip our farmers.  Ultimately, we formed four teams in Bukalasi.  

·        Team A – Irene, Team Leader | 50 members

·        Team B – Beth, Team Leader | 50 members

·        Team C – Florence, Team Leader | 50 members

·        Team D – Aida, Team Leader | 50 members

As we have reported previously, the 2015-16 season saw a harvest of about 7,000 kilograms of parchment coffee produced in Bukalasi. The next year the volume doubled, allowing us to input over $32,000 into the community.

This year, at the beginning of the harvest season, we committed to increasing our price to 8,300 UGX per kilo of coffee.  The teams responded by producing more coffee in one season than in the previous two seasons combined – approximately 49,000 kilograms of coffee! This generated more than $110,000 for the community – money that is having an enormous and catalytic impact.

Bukalasi Life is Changing

The testimonies that we hear from Bukalasi coffee farmers are what keep us going.  Team Leader Irene reported that her farmers are buying more land, cows for milk, and bulls for meat.  She said that the children of the farmers in her team are in school and that domestic violence in the households is diminishing.  Aida, another team leader shared many of the same things and Beth spoke of how family life is improving and how new group savings plans have been instituted which are helping families during the off season.  Another farmer was able to use her money to build a rental house in a nearby city which is producing additional income for her family.  Many other farmers have made similar investments into auxiliary forms of income so that the coffee income is being multiplied – many families are quickly approaching and some have even surpassed the international poverty line.

In the next generation changes are quite pronounced. Now moving into our fourth year of coffee farming, we are celebrating with families who are able to pay for their older children to attend universities and trade schools.  One farmer has even reported that his daughter was accepted in a pre-medicine program at a university in Germany! Time will tell how the village of Bukalasi will be impacted by children who grow up healthy and educated.

Brewing all the Good We Can!

In addition to surveying the progress of the coffee farming projects, we spent considerable time with the team leaders workshopping, praying and dreaming about the future.  We have been inspired by the words of John Wesley:

“Do all the good you can, by all the means you can, in all the ways you can, in all the places you can, at all the times you can, to all the people you can, as long as ever you can.”

The powerful, almost desperate passion evident in Wesley’s voice here is how we feel all the time.  So much has been accomplished in Bukalasi and it would be tempting to sit back and rest in that for a while.  However, we still see so many challenges.  There is still so much poverty in Bukalasi.  So much need. So much brokenness.  And then there are many other villages in need.  We cannot be complacent.  

In the spirit of Wesley, we have adopted a new motto, “Brewing all the Good We Can!” What that means is that we are going to continue pressing forward in Bukalasi and elsewhere to do all the good we can in all the ways we can as long as we can.  Here are a few of our new projects at various stages of development:

 ·        Mattaya Coffee – We have officially started a new group in the nearby village of Manafwa.  Fifty farmers are there working with us and have produced just over 1,000 kilograms in their first season with us.  As some of you have tasted, the coffee is delicious and we hope to grow their capacity in the coming years.

 ·        “Drink the Whole Tree” – We are working with the Bukalasi farmers on developing products which make use of coffee cherries and coffee leaves in order to add additional income for our coffee farmers.  Some of you have tasted the first fruits of our coffee leaf teas and cascara drinks. There is more to come!

 ·        Goats from Mubende to Bukalasi – We have had the blessing of partnering with a goat project in Mubende, Uganda which has helped a number of refugee children get access to education, food and other basic needs.  Now the leader of that project is helping us to develop strategies for raising goats in other areas.

 ·        “Karamoja Honey” – We are partnering with some good friends among the Karamoja to develop a sustainable and scalable bee-keeping project.  Also, in 2018 we will be helping to sponsor “Tour of Karamoja”, an amazing mountain biking tour which will raise awareness and interest in the very needy Karamoja region. Could there be Karamoja coffee one day?

 ·        Iganga Chickens to Chocolate – We have reopened a coffee bar in Iganga and are continuing to work on some agricultural projects in a nearby village.  Recently we have developed a strategy together with a group of farmers to raise chickens, goats and then chocolate.  It sounds weird, but it’s happening.  Who doesn’t want to see Endiro Chocolate?

We really do thank God and thank all of you for helping us get this far.  As you can see, our dreams for the future are even bigger.  Please keep buying and drinking our coffee and telling others to do the same. We have some great new coffee roasting partners who are helping us to move more coffee and are helping to tell the amazing Bukalasi story.  We also have a number of awesome wholesale partners who are buying our coffee for their cafes, restaurants, and churches.  We are careful to give plenty of shout outs to these partners on our social media pages, so be sure to follow us on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook.  

[Want to buy wholesale green or roasted coffee? Click here and fill out the contact form.]

Endiro Growers Bukalasi Women’s Group is ready for harvest!

There has been significant coffee news out of Uganda lately.  The Ugandan Coffee Development Authority reported that total exports for the 2016-17 season increased by 18% (https://www.independent.co.ug/ugandas-surging-coffee-exports/), boosting the nation to the top status among African coffee exporters.

Another announcement was recently made by the world’s largest furniture retailer, Ikea, who has entered into a multiyear agreement with Ugandan coffee giant Kawacom to put some 500,000 retail bags of coffee on the shelves of their stores around the world (https://dailycoffeenews.com/2017/10/24/ikea-to-begin-selling-coffee-as-part-of-multiyear-uganda-commitment/). 

Such stories were welcomed with excitement by coffee industry players in Uganda, but just how good is this news?

Unfortunately, it is too quickly assumed that increased exports of Ugandan coffee automatically mean good things for the farmers who grow it.  Global coffee trade, however, has long been a demand-side industry in which practically every bean has a buyer somewhere. The farmer who sold all of their coffee last year is not necessarily better off when they sell all of their beans again this year.  Selling out does not necessarily equal economic growth in business and thus cannot be thought to automatically signal positive transformation in the coffee village.

What does?

Transformation of the Coffee Village

Think about it.  A farmer, let’s call her Joyce, who sold 500 kilos of coffee cherries at 1000 Ugandan shillings (UGX) per kilo ($0.27 USD) in the 2013-14 season has made a total of 500,000 UGX or $138 USD.  If demand for Joyce’s coffee increases during the next year she can still only sell a maximum of 100% of her crop.  So, the only way her condition can improve is if she has the means to increase her crop volume or the price at which she sells it. Unfortunately, in Uganda, most farmers don’t have this kind of power.

When we at Endiro began to explore the farm side of coffee a few years ago, we discovered that even the “Fair Trade” farmers were not receiving either fair trade wages or any kind of community inputs which would help them to increase their volumes.  Instead farmers were facing annually decreasing crop yields and were being offered ever-decreasing prices for their coffee.

So, the reality was that a farmer like Joyce from our scenario above reached the 2014-15 season and found that she had only 300 kilos to sell and that the coffee buyers had decreased their buying price to 900 shillings per kilo. Joyce then earned only 270,000 UGX or $75 USD.  Her hope that coffee could ever improve her quality of life was quickly diminishing.

A recent report by Lehigh University’s Kelly Austin found that the average coffee farming family in Uganda’s coffee-rich Bududa district earns only about $100 USD per year from their crops. Austin goes on to cite increased illnesses, poor education access for children, and gender inequality as just a few side effects of this extreme poverty. (FULL REPORT)

Facilitating change is, at one level, quite simple. If coffee is going to become a source of hope and positive transformation, two things must happen.  First, farmers must get better prices for their coffee and, second, they must achieve better crop yields.

Bukalasi as we found it

Endiro has been dedicated to pursuing these two things since 2015.  We began our work in Bududa’s Bukalasi community with a group of women and men who had been exploited for many years.  These were farmers who were producing coffee that ultimately made it to the shelves of grocery stores in the USA and Europe in packages stamped with a “Fair Trade Certified” label.  Their reality however was far from fair.  The Bukalasi women were selling their ever-decreasing volumes of coffee to middlemen as cherries for 800-1500 UGX per kilo.  The middlemen then resold the coffee to cooperatives and brokers who then continued to move the coffee through several layers of trade on its way to Third Wave coffee joints and high-end grocery stores in the West. No money made it back to Bukalasi in the form of trainings, equipment, or community development projects.  The farmers were left to struggle alone against drought, pests, sickness and more. After  all, if they failed to produce, there was always another farmer somewhere else who had coffee to sell.

Endiro Growers Bukalasi Women’s Group

There is little question that we at Endiro had almost no idea what we were doing when we first began to partner with the ladies of Bukalasi.  We had never farmed coffee and had almost zero agricultural knowledge.  What we did have was a passionate and uncompromising commitment to a few key principles:

1) Ignoring global market prices, we would pay 8,000 UGX per kilo of coffee, without exception.  

2) We would train and equip the farmers so that they could perform initial processing (floating, pulping, washing, drying) so that we could achieve a specialty grade coffee.

3) We would do everything in the context of genuine relationship.

The farmers didn’t believe we were serious at first.  After all, no one was paying that much for coffee.  No one was paying anything close to that.  We were surely deceiving them.  So, at first, they protected themselves.  They used our equipment and continued to sell most of their coffee to the middlemen. When we came for the first portion of the harvest in 2015, we found only a little more than a ton of coffee.  But then the money started to be distributed and the farmers realized that we were for real.  We finished that season (2015-16) with just under 7,000 kilos of coffee.

Now, remember Joyce, our imagined farmer from above.  If she sold us her 300 kilos of coffee that year, she just made 2.4 million shillings ($650 USD). That’s significant.

During the offseason, we continued to coach, pray with and work alongside farmers to re-strategize their farming methods. By teaching them basics of harvesting, pruning, teamwork, how to create natural organic fertilizers and how to control pests through organic methods we saw that the farmers increased their yields for the 2016-17 season by over 100%.  We bought over 14,000 kilos from Bukalasi last season and the resulting quality has been judged by many to be Uganda’s best tasting coffee. In fact that Bukalasi coffee is now being enjoyed as far away as the USA, the UK, Taiwan, Thailand, Laos, and elsewhere.

Once again, we check in with Joyce, our representative farmer.  Now, her crop has increased from 300 kilos to 600.  Joyce now has an annual income on par with the Ugandan national average, something she had never dreamed possible.

During a recent visit to Bukalasi to launch the new season, we heard from all of the Bukalasi team leaders – farmers elected by their peers to represent teams of 50 farmers.  Their testimonies were breathtaking.  One woman said that it was the first time in her life that she had ever seen 1 million shillings.  She was immediately followed by another farmer who said it was her first time to see 2 million!  Several farmers reported that they used their money from last year to buy milk cows and that as a result their children were no longer suffering from malnourishment. Many farmers used their earnings to pay school fees for their children who were no longer missing class.  A young man reported with pride that he had begun nursing school thanks to the family’s coffee earnings.  One can only imagine the long-term impact that an educated younger generation will have on Bukalasi.  The reports continued for a long time.

For the 2017-18 season, the women of Bukalasi have set a goal of 50,000 kilos of coffee and so far they are well on pace.  Preliminary testing suggests that the coffee this year will be the best they’ve ever produced, approaching cupping scores in the high 80s.  Some of our farmers will produce 1000, 2000, 3000 kilos or more and find themselves quickly approaching the ranks of Uganda’s middle class.

For our part, we have stepped up our commitment to these farmers.  We will be paying 8,300 UGX per kilo this season in Bukalasi and investing in additional equipment, training and more. We are even working to develop coffee leaf tea and cascara (a beverage made from the dried fruit of coffee cherries) so as to bring two additional streams of revenue to the Endiro Growers Bukalasi Group.  

I am not poor, but my head is poor.

This is what we mean when we say we are “brewing better together.”  We mean partnering with the farming families, who must be fully participating agents in building their own future, to develop holistic strategies which genuinely bring transformation. The ladies of Bukalasi have a saying that they have adopted as a kind of motto for their forward success – “I am not poor, but my head is poor.” We believe that these women have much to teach a world of ultra-wealthy coffee conglomerates who cannot seem to afford to increase the amount of money they pay farmers. In fact, they have much to teach all of us.  How many of our supposed obstacles are little more than mental blocks?  Maybe we aren’t so poor, but our heads are poor.

LOOKING TO BREW A BETTER WORLD IN IGANGA!

We are thrilled to announce that Endiro is taking the next steps for a long and bright future in Iganga. Several things are in the works:

1. In partnership with local farmers and other partners, fields are planted for the growth of coffee and cacao along with other key crops. We want to see quality of life improving for the folks there and will have much more to say about this soon. What will Iganga coffee be like? Will we be enjoying Endiro Chocolate soon?

2. Endiro will launch its first guest house soon in Iganga and is in the process of finishing our beautiful new property for this purpose.  Out of the hustle of the city, visitors will enjoy a retreat style environment and will have opportunities to learn from local farmers and artisans.  

3. Endiro’s coffee shop in Iganga will temporarily close so that we can rebuild in an improved location nearer to the guest house. Building a new location from the ground up will allow us to create jobs for local workers and improve amenities for our customers.  Look for Endiro’s shop on the main road to close by the end of this month and stay tuned for construction updates on our new location.

Just over a year ago, we began working alongside women and some men farmers in Bukalasi to improve the quality of the coffee they had been producing and to increase the value that they were receiving for their families and community through the sale of coffee.  We have reported much about this. 

Well, we are now overjoyed to report that the Bukalasi women have now gone to the district of Manafwa to train women their in how to do what they have been doing in terms of coffee production and leadership development. 15 new teams have formed in Manafwa and we expect to bring you single-origin Ugandan Manafwa coffee later this year. The ladies of Manafwa will join the Bukalasi women as the highest paid (per kilo parchment) coffee farmers in the country. We are so honored to be welcomed into the Manafwa community.