Sironco, Uganda – Meridah Nandudu imagined a coffee sister in Uganda and it was easy to expand: When a female producer takes the beans to a collection point, pay a higher price per kilogram.
It worked. More than a large number of men who usually made delivery allow their wives to go instead.
Nandudu’s Business Group now has more than a few dozens of women in 2022.
“Women are so discouraged by coffee in such a way that when you look at the (the) coffee value chain, women work donkeys,” said Nandudu. But when coffee is ready for sale, men take steps to claim this money.
His goal is to reverses the trend of a community where coffee production is not possible without women’s labor.
Uganda is one of the top two coffee producers in Africa and the crop is its top export. According to the Uganda Coffee Development Authority, the East African country exported more than a million million coffee coffee from September 2020 to August 2021.
The world’s top coffee producer is increasing in Brazil as the production is increasing, which faces hostile drought conditions.
In the district of Sironco, where Nandudu grew up in a remote village near the Kenya border, coffee is lively in the community. As a girl, when she was not in school, she helped her to look after her mother and other women’s acres of coffee plant. They usually plant with routine after harvest, weeds and working hard, which include coffee, cucumber, washing and drying.
He said that the harvest season was reported to be intense in the case of domestic violence. The couples fought on the income that men brought home – and how much they didn’t do.
“When (men) sell and sell, they don’t do it accountable. Our mothers cannot ask ‘we don’t have food in our house You have sold coffee. Can you pay school fees for this child?” He said.
A few years later, Nandudu earned a degree in social science from the top public university in Uganda in 2015, and his father financed his education from coffee earning. She got the idea of launching an organization that would prioritize the needs of women who produce coffee in the conservative society of the country.
He thought his project as a Sisterhood and chose a translation of the Lumasaba language for his organization’s name.
It was launched in 2018, operating like others that directly buy coffee from farmers and process it for export.
However, the largest city in East Uganda, East Uganda, is unique, to focus on women and to borrow and borrow for a cooperative conservation society.
For small-handed Uganda farmers in remote areas, a small movement of one kilogram of coffee is a major event. The decision to sell to one or the other intermediary often depends on the difference in smaller price.
A decade ago, the price of coffee bought by an intermediary from a Uganda farmer was about 8,000 Uganda shillings, or only more than $ 2 in today’s exchange rate. Now the price is about 5 dollars.
Nandudu bought from a woman and added an additional 200 shilling to each kilogram. It is enough of an enthusiasm that more women are joining. Another advantage is to pay a small bonus in the off-seizen from February to August.
It is said to many local men “inspired to believe in selling their women,” Nandudu said. “When a woman sells coffee, she has a hand” “
There are many collection points in the Nandudu group across East Uganda, and women trek them at least twice a week. Men are not turned away.
The team sold as a member of the Beyah encouraged the work because his family had jointly decided to spend how to earn coffee, Linate Gimono, who joined the squad in 2022, said.
And with assured earnings, she is often able to carry her as a female “small thing”. “I can buy soap (and) I can buy sugar without pulling the rope with my husband,” she said.
Juliet Koyaga, another member, said her mother never thought of collecting coffee because her father was very in charge.
Now, the husband of Quaigar is feeling comfortable sending her with some enthusiasm. “At the end of the day I go home with something to feed my family, to support my kids,” he said.
In the district of Sironco, more than 200,000 people, coffee trees give the hilly terrain. Most farming has one or two acres of land plot, though some families have greater tracts.
Many farmers usually do not drink coffee and some do not taste it. Some women smiled in embarrassment when asked that it was liked.
But things are slowly changing. Routine coffee drinkers are growing among young women in the coffee business in urban areas, where most employees are women.
Phobo Nabuteil, who helps to oversee the assurance of quality coffee for the beloved coffee, was raised in a family of coffee producers. He turned on the roster, the beans smell until he got his aroma.
He said many of his girlfriends regularly ask how they can break the coffee business, as a roster or otherwise.
For Nandudu, who has taken the goal of starting the export of beans, this is progress.
She said there are more women now “coffee as a business”.
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