How One Woman Changed Her Village's Coffee Industry By Empowering Women – CoffeeTalk

Meridah Nandudu, a 35-year-old social work graduate, has transformed the coffee industry in her village of Bugibulungu, Uganda. She now owns Bayaaya Specialty Coffee in Mbale, Uganda, which she buys directly from over 600 women farmers. Nandudu’s journey began when she couldn’t find a job after graduating with a degree in social work. She realized that coffee is more than just a drink to her and a critical part of her life story and her work to improve the lives of women in her community.

Nandudu grew up in the remote village of Bugibulungu, near the border with Kenya, on a hill lush with banana and arabica coffee trees. Her parents and grandparents were coffee farmers, but she was not interested in following in their footsteps due to gender dynamics. In Uganda, coffee is seen as a man’s thing, including producing, selling, and consuming it. Women are reluctant to even drink coffee because there is a belief that it will affect their fertility. However, they do play an invisible and thankless role in the industry: they help grow the beans.

Nandudu’s grand dream was to leave her village, create a new life for herself, and one day come back to help the women in her community. However, her memories are tainted by the violence and abuse she saw the women in her community suffer. Harvest season was the worst, as couples would fight over how to spend the money earned from coffee farming, leading to a surge in domestic violence.

Nandudu’s mother told her that if the women in her community had their own money, it would give them options to help them get away from difficult situations, like an abusive spouse. Most of these violence cases came as a result of women being overly dependent on their husbands. Her neighbors would also regularly come to their house asking for basic goods like salt or sugar, afraid to tell their husbands to go buy them, because it would lead to violence.

Nandudu’s mother encouraged her to come back to the village and change the life of the women in her community if an opportunity came up. By embracing the power of coffee and empowering women in her community, Nandudu is making a significant impact on the lives of women in Uganda.

Meridah Nandudu, a woman from Uganda, left her village to study law in Kampala, Uganda’s capital. However, she struggled to find a job due to high unemployment rates. She began thinking about coffee as one of Uganda’s top exports and realized that there was money to be made in the industry. She devised a plan to get money directly into the hands of the women in her village by offering an incentive: an extra 200 Ugandan shillings (about 6 U.S. cents) per kilogram of coffee from her own profits if their wives could sell directly to her.

Eventually, Nandudu married and had two kids. As the years went by, she felt trapped with a controlling husband. In 2020, when Nandudu was 30 years old, she had an epiphany and decided to return to her coffee roots. She decided to build a specialty coffee business by buying from the farmers in her village and selling the dry beans to roasters and exporters.

However, she quickly realized there was a lot she didn’t know. She began making mistakes, such as not drying the beans fully or storing them near livestock, which interfered with the smell of the beans. These mistakes cost her a lot of money and wasted beans. She knew she needed guidance but couldn’t afford courses that would provide training.

In 2020, Nandudu heard about a program funded by the Netherlands that offered free business training to young entrepreneurs working in agriculture in Uganda. After just three months in the program, Nandudu says her whole life changed. She learned how to care for the crops and increase yields, how to get the most yield from the crop, and how to maintain the quality of the bean once it has been picked from the tree and goes through the whole process until it dries. She also learned about finances, how to use a bank for business, and how to save money.

Nandudu started preaching a coffee gospel to the women in the village, teaching them what she had learned in her training and convincing them to sell their coffee beans to her. However, she encountered resistance from the men in the village, who wouldn’t allow their wives to sell the coffee at all. Employees at Bayaaya Specialty Coffee sort the coffee coming in from the farms, and the coffee is on cloths spread on the floor.

Bayaaya Specialty Coffee, a Ugandan coffee company, has been working to empower women by providing them with the opportunity to earn their own income. The company’s employees sort coffee from farms, which is done by hand except for the hulling machine, which strips the papery outer layer off the beans. The remaining green coffee beans are then sold to roasters.

The money from all that work would go directly to the man of the house, who would then disappear when they go and sell the coffee. This left women without a voice in the decision-making process. To address this issue, Meridah Nandudu devised a plan to get money directly into the hands of the women. She offered an incentive: an extra 200 Ugandan shillings (about 6 U.S. cents) per kilogram of coffee from her own profits if their wives could sell directly to her. The incentive money also went to the women, but the men recognized it would ultimately mean more money for their households.

Five years later, Nandudu now buys from over 600 women farmers and several hundred male farmers too. She has won awards and grants that have helped her grow her company. Her mission and her success have become an inspiration to many other aspiring entrepreneurs in Uganda who also grew up with limited resources. Jackie Aldrette, executive director of AVSI-USA, the organization that provided Nandudu’s training with funding from the Netherlands, says that the energy of a true protagonist spills over and lifts others as well.

Juliet Kwaga, 31, harvests coffee on her farm in Bugibulungu village in eastern Uganda. She was one of the first farmers who sold her beans to Nandudu. She learned how to use manure in her farm, dig trenches for drainage, and prevent soil erosion during heavy rains. Now, she can take her child to school, buy her basic needs, and don’t overly depend on her husband who continues to farm and sell coffee.

For Nandudu, the dream is only just beginning. She plans to expand her business by roasting her own coffee and exporting it, and create more employment for women. Her motivation remains the same as when she had her epiphany: “[To see] a woman empowered, [to see] a woman’s life changing from being that woman that would literally have to beg to being a woman that can make decisions.”

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