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The Tanzania Initiative
The principles haven’t changed – TechnoServe assists poor farmers in entrepreneurial skills and links them to us, their potential customer – but the Association of Kilimanjaro Specialty Coffee Growers (aka Kilicafe) has matured, grown up. Kilicafe has enjoyed 5 years’ continuous growth on the back of strong prices paid for their quality. However, they are now a 5 million dollar business and require sophisticated management skills to stay on top of their business.
It has been five years since we at Peet’s imported our first direct shipment of Kahawa Spesheli – specialty coffee, as it’s called in Swahili – from Kilicafe. Since then, farmers have learned repeatedly the lesson of quality: produce the best and the price will repay your efforts. Kilicafe’s farmers earn higher prices than most estate coffees in Tanzania and new Farmer Business Groups constantly want to join the Association and benefit from this strength. They anticipate 20 new additions in 2009. The farmer network now incorporates some 13,000 farmers producing a total of almost 1 million pounds of coffee.
The central pulping stations installed to create coffee quality have become more efficient: they present less work and headaches for the farmer, particularly the women, who bore the bulk of home processing labour prior to installation.
The model has proven itself: once remote farmers have learned to produce the quality that Peet’s pays premium pricing for, and their livelihoods have improved as a result. Here are some individual success stories:
- Eliezer and Eliaman Munuo
- Allen and Rose Mlay
- Dawson and Munyiaichi Lyimo
- Abdueli and Elizabeth Mbise
- Anderson and Goodness Sykao
It is October 2008 and Doug and Shirin, our coffee buyers, have traveled to Tanzania to touch base with TechnoServe and Kilicafe, to reaffirm our conviction that this is responsible, sustainable and equitable trade: specialty coffee in exchange for superior pricing. The model has in fact proven so successful that other farmer groups and cooperatives outside the Kilicafe Association hope to participate in it as well.
To learn more about TechnoServe's coffee work or make a donation, please visit:
http://www.TechnoServe.org
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