Across Africa and Latin America, TechnoServe works with farmers to sustainably improve the quality and quantity of the coffee they produce.* It helps link small-scale farmers to specialty coffee buyers who pay a premium for their high-quality beans. The higher incomes help transform families, communities and countries.
The highlands of Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, and Tanzania have some of the world’s most perfect conditions for growing premium coffee. But for many years due to poor farmer knowledge and poor processing, potentially premium coffee beans when
harvested and processed became mediocre coffee. Starting in the mid-2000s, TechnoServe began helping Tanzanian coffee farmers to turn their potential into a real, top-notch product through training, organization into cooperatives, and improved agricultural techniques and input (fertilizer, plants, irrigation, etc.). TechnoServe then connected these high quality beans to markets that would appreciate them, producing Kilicafe coffee.
This improvement impressed the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation which in turn funded major programs to turnaround Kenya, Rwanda, and Ethiopia coffee crops into premium product, then connect them with the likes of Starbucks, Peets’ Coffee, and other upscale retailers. Now many of these same small-scale coffee Kenyan farmers, living in some of the poorest places on earth, can help the world brew one of its favorite, most ubiquitous—and now Premium African–beverages.
*Based on TechnoServe’s website stories.
