A Business Case for the Whole Family: ICP Projects in Uganda
“Coffee is wealth” announces the billboard in front of the little brick-lined house in Kirema. And the small meeting room inside is pasted with flipcharts and posters, depicting “vision”, “mission” and “values”, annual plans, challenges, objectives, achievements.
Prepared for a Better Future
From 2021 to 2023, International Coffee Partners (ICP) conducted a project to support the 487 coffee farmers of Kirema and four other cooperatives in the neighboring districts of Luwero and Nakasongola. The project had two main goals: strengthening family businesses and developing a gender-approach to include women and youth into the coffee sector.
"We learned a lot about strategic planning during our collaboration with ICP. Now we are applying what we’ve learned on our own."
Victor Komakech, who passed by for a visit this day, has no doubt that the cooperative will continue the good work – and make success sustainable. “I am very proud of what has been achieved by Kirema. And I am sure they are well prepared for a better future”, says Komakech. He is the Climate Change Coordinator at Hanns R. Neumann Stiftung (HRNS) Uganda, the implementer of the ICP project, and has established a strong personal relationship with “his” coffee farmers over the years.
Small Gardens and Weak Structures
70 % of Uganda’s population is working in agriculture. An estimated 1,7 million households are into coffee farming, turning Uganda into the second biggest coffee producer on the continent after Ethiopia and before Kenya. But the sector is facing a major structural challenge: coffee producing in Uganda is mostly an individual family business, cooperative structures are weak, coffee gardens are small and often not very well maintained, productivity is low. Many farmers barely have access to market and finance. ICP supports them in improving their technical as well as their marketing skills to turn coffee gardens into a small profitable business.
That coffee farming indeed can be an attractive business – given the currently high prices on the world coffee market – still awaits to be recognized by Uganda’s youth. 77 % of the population are under the age of 30, with 80 % of the young generation being unemployed. Yet, for many living in remote areas, farming does not come as a solution to their mind. Looking for quick results, young people rather migrate to Kampala than working in their families’ coffee garden, hoping to make their luck as driver of a “boda-boda”, the motorbike-taxis omnipresent in Uganda’s capital. But high hopes quickly turn into disappointment. With an estimated 500.000 boda-boda drivers already flooding Kampala’s streets, competition is high, earnings are low and the likelihood of having a severe accident in the cities’ increasingly overwhelming and dangerous traffic is big.
Thus, fighting against the image of coffee farming as a “boring” and “old-fashioned” activity is a crucial part of the ICP project in Uganda.
"We want young people to come back, apply a more professional approach, establish sustainable and profitable coffee businesses and become role models within the smallholder coffee farming communities."
“Making the coffee sector sexier for the youth”, is what his colleague Victor calls this approach in somewhat more casual words.
Love, Care, Safety – and a Change of Mindset
Some minds have already changed. A stop-over at the farm of the Nseko family – an idyllic, lush green and shadowy oasis in Kyetumo, a village in the district of Mityana, Central Uganda: Josefine and Charles live up to their name. Nseko means “Laughing” in the local Luganda language – and this is what both like to do often. They have reason to do so. Their farm is a success story of its own. Trained in the ICP framework, Josefine and Charles nowadays apply the method of “water harvesting”, small trenches and dams to collect rainwater and water running down the streets for irrigation.
Animal dung is used as fertilizer, banana trees overshadow the coffee plants, and the coffee bushes are planted in well-kept rows to allow farmers to move smoothly between the plants, thus facilitating maintenance. For Charles, this is his secret to success: “Love your garden for him to love you.”
Love and care are complemented by safety. With the support of ICP, a centralized chemical store was installed at the Nseko farm. Unlike before, when each farmer kept such dangerous and polluting items somewhere on their land without any protection measures, all the chemicals used in the village are now kept in a little wooden and well locked-up house, supervised by Charles and only handed out to fellow farmers upon request.
Michael is 22 and lives on the Nseko farm with his parents Josefine and Charles. Different to many of his peers, he does not aim to rush to the city to look for income. He, who saw his father working as a tailor for many years to make a living, now witnesses his family running a profitable coffee business – by handling the formerly neglected garden in a professional way.
"I would like to take over the farm from my parents one day, because it works so well."
Such success would not have been possible without the very specific approach that ICP applies to all trainings and support: the “household mechanism”. Based on the conviction that a family business can only be run effectively once all family members are involved, this approach addresses men and women equally. Unlike in the past, when coffee farming was a man’s duty with the women being widely left out, the trainers bring the couples together, encouraging them to do a joint household planning right from the beginning.
What are we aiming at? How can we improve our income from the coffee garden? What is our spendings? What are our financial goals for the next two or five years? Questions like these are supposed to be raised together, with the answers written on a vision board. In many households around the villages those boards can nowadays be seen hanging on the wall – made of cardboards in eye-catching pink or yellow and sometimes supplemented with vivid drawings.
"Since we have this vision board, I can always look at it and remind myself of what we have already achieved and what remains to be done."
Change of roles and mindsets are of course indispensable preconditions for such household planning. Something that does not come so easy at first. “When we do our gender trainings, men and women first sit separately in different corners of the room and we do not even know, who is the partner of whom”, Victor Komakech says. „Then we tell them to sit together as couples, discuss and plan together. For some, this sems like a joke at first glance. But at the end of the day, you can see how much they appreciate this new way of thinking and planning.”
Charles Nseko agrees to this: “Before I was thinking in terms of ‘mine’. Now we think of the coffee farming as ‘ours’ and that has brought more harmony but also more income to the family.”
Coffee Business Concerns the Whole Family
“More peace in the house” and “more money in the pocket”, these are results reported by other farmers as well who have applied the household approach. Women, who formerly were not allowed to participate in the coffee farming and therefore lost interest, are now actively contributing, which enhances productivity. And while the income was previously spent by the man alone – way too often in local bars – the couple now decides together on how to spend the resources for the business to grow and the family to develop.
Christopher und Sarah Busulwa in Nakaseke District have gone through similar experiences. On their six-acre farm they now harvest two times a year, mutating from a little coffee garden without notable financial interest to a profitable small business. Attaining new skills was mostly possible by seeing other examples.
"The learning visits to other farms, organized during the ICP project phase, changed our perception."
Today Christopher does not need any side job to coffee farming any more to gain enough money. Instead, he and Sarah are proud of the new house that they could build for themselves and their six children, based on the coffee revenues.
Meanwhile, Uganda’s government too has ambitious plans to boost the national coffee sector. According to the “National Coffee Roadmap” 20 million bags of 60 kg each are aimed to be produced by 2030, with an earnings target of 1,5 billion US-dollars. Coffee extension officers are supposed to help the farmers grow; advising on coffee diseases, implementing new technologies, further development of coffee nurseries, data production and marketing are also part of the plan. Yet, governmental financial and personal resources are weak – collaboration with external experts remains indispensable.
Land Is a Treasure for the Future
In April 2024, ICP started to work in two new project areas: in Kyotera district, reaching out to 2,000 households and five cooperatives, and - together with the J.M. Smuckers project – in Rakai for 3,000 households and 9 cooperatives.
We visit the small village of Buyika in a vulnerable region, struck by poverty, weak infrastructure and prevailing HIV/Aid. Under a tree, in front of a huge construction site that shall become the new church, sit the board members of the local coffee cooperative. Betty Namata, Henry Kawooya, Alex Kalema and Ronaldo Kikomeko, all the way into their sixties, have gathered for a meeting.
What do they wish for the most? Attracting more members to the cooperative, which tries to regain life after years of stagnation. But this is not easy, as Betty points out: “After the take-over of the current regime in the 80s there was a time, when the government tried to destroy cooperatives. A lot of people lost a lot of money. So, some of the older people are afraid this could happen again.” Whereas the youth, here like elsewhere, look down on coffee farming as something old-fashioned, an activity “for the elderly.” Betty: “They all need to realize that land is a treasure.”
Lessons Learned Are Applied
Capacity building on a grassroot level, enhancing technical skills, structure and marketing as well as a gender-based approach to coffee farming – the expectations in Buyika for the next two project years are very much alike to what has already been experienced by their fellow farmers in Luwero, Nakaseke, and Nakasangolo.
HRNS as implementer of the ICP project is keen to extend successful strategies from these regions to the farmers in Buyika and the other new project areas – above all a participatory and needs-based approach.
“We have to avoid assuming for the communities, they know best what they need the most”, project manager Komakech concludes. There are also “lessons learned” from previous projects, such as “not to do too many activities at once”, as Victor states.
Yet, the overall vision for change persists, supporting coffee farmers in Uganda is not about mere survival. It is about creating sustainable family businesses – by integrating aspects of life that go far beyond technical skills.
