SYONKO, UGANDA – Meridah Nandudu imagined a coffee brotherhood in UgandaAnd the strategy to expand it was simple: to pay a higher price per kilogram when a grower brought the beans to a collection point.
It worked. More and more men who generally made the deliveries allowed their wives to leave.
The Nandudu Business Group now includes more than 600 women, compared to dozens in 2022. That is about 75% of the groups of registered farmers of their coffee specialized in Bayaya in this mountainous area of the East of the East Uganda that produces precious Arabic beans and sells for exporters.
“Women have been so discouraged by coffee in a way that, when you look (the) coffee value chain, women do donkey’s job,” Nandudu said. But when coffee is ready to sell, men are involved to claim income.
Its objective is to reverse that trend in a community where coffee production is not possible without the work of women.
Uganda is one of the two main coffee producers in Africa, and the harvest is its main export. The Eastern Africa country exported more than 6 million coffee bags between September 2023 and August 2024, representing $ 1.3 billion in profits, according to the Uganda Coffee Development Authority.
The profits have increased as production decreases in Brazil, the best coffee producer in the world, which faces Unfavorable drought conditions.
In the Syonko district, where Nandudu grew up in a remote village near the border of Kenya, coffee is the soul of the community. When I was a child, when I was not at school, she helped her mother and other women take care of coffee plants. Usually, they planted, eliminated and worked with the routine after the harvest that includes pulp, fermentation, washing and coffee drying.
It was known that the harvest season coincided with an increase in cases of domestic violence, he said. The couples fought for the amount of profits that men brought to the house of sales, and how much they did not.
“When (men) are going to sell, they are not responsible. Our mothers cannot ask: ‘We don’t have food at home. Café sold. Can you pay school rates for this child?” He said.
Years later, Nandudu obtained his title in the social sciences of the best public university in Uganda in 2015, with his father financing his education from coffee profits. He had the idea of launching a company that would prioritize the needs of coffee producing women in the country’s conservative society.
He thought about his project as a kind of brotherhood and chose “Bayaya”, a translation in the Lumasaba language, by the name of his company.
It was launched in 2018, operating like others who buy coffee directly from farmers and process it for export.
But Bayaya is unique in Mbale, the largest city in the east of Uganda, to focus on women and initiatives such as a cooperative salvation society of which members can contribute and borrow.
For small ugandes farmers in remote areas, a small movement in the price of a kilogram of coffee is an important event. The decision to sell to one or another intermediary often depends on small price differences.
A decade ago, the price of coffee purchased through an intermediary of a Uganda farmer was approximately 8,000 chelines of Uganda, or just over $ 2 at the current exchange rate. Now the price costs approximately $ 5.
Nandudu adds 200 additional chelines to the price of each kilogram that buy a woman. It is enough incentive for more women to join. Another benefit is a small bonus payment during the low season from February to August.
That motivates many local men “to trust their women to sell coffee,” said Nandudu. “When a woman sells coffee, she has a hand.”
The Nandudu group has many collection points throughout Uganda, and women travel to them at least twice a week. Men are not rejected.
Selling as a member of Bayaya has fostered teamwork when your family collectively decides how to spend coffee profits, said Linet Gimono, who joined the group in 2022.
And with safe profits, the “small things” that you often need as a woman can be allowed. “I can buy soap (and) I can buy sugar without pulling strings with my husband on him,” he said.
Another member, Juliet Kwaga, said his mother would never have thought about collecting coffee profits because his father was very in charge.
Now, Kwaga’s husband, with a little breath, feels comfortable by sending her. “At the end of the day I go home with something to feed my family, to keep my children,” he said.
In the district of Syonko, home of more than 200,000 people, the cafés dot the mountain land. Much of agriculture is in plots of one or two acres, although some families have larger extensions.
Many farmers do not usually drink coffee, and some have never tried it. Some women smiled shamelessly when asked how he knew.
But things are changing slowly. Routine coffee drinkers are emerging among younger women in the coffee business in urban areas, even in a MBALE roasting place, where most employees are women.
Phoebe Nabutale, who helps supervise the quality guarantee for Darling Coffee, grew up in a family of coffee makers. He leaned over the toaster, smelling the beans until he obtained the aroma he wanted.
Many of his girlfriends, he said, regularly ask how they can enter the coffee business, such as toaster or otherwise.
For Nandudu, which aims to start exporting beans, that is progress.
There are now more women in “coffee as a business,” he said.
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