Brewing Good
Our Coffee Initiative is helping East African farmers to build better lives, one coffee bean at a time.
READ MOREImpact
As part of the Coffee Initiative, TechnoServe has helped establish 123 cooperative-owned wet mills, creating opportunities for 95,483 smallholder farmers to boost their incomes.
Stories
On The Ground
Projects
Supporting Smallholder Coffee Farmers
Coffee contributes more than 30 percent of annual export earnings, and provides a livelihood for over one million... households. Since 2009, TechnoServe helped establish 90 new farmer-owned wet mills across Ethiopia as part of the Coffee Initiative. These wet mills have given smallholder farmers a way to produce consistent, high-quality washed coffee and earn premiums averaging 50 percent above the price of unwashed coffee. In the program’s first year, a cooperative with a new wet mill located near the town of Jimma took top prize at the national Taste of Harvest event. In 2012, a TechnoServe-assisted cooperative in Agaro won the Africa Taste of Harvest competition. TechnoServe is continuing its work by providing agronomy training to over 50,000 coffee farmers in Ethiopia.
Partners
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
Promoting Sustainable Water Management
Hundreds of millions of liters of effluent are discharged into the rivers of Ethiopia’s Sidamo region during coffee... processing without adequate waste water management. This polluted water then becomes source water for communities and wet mills downstream. The problem has become so acute that legislation was passed to prevent new wet mill construction within five kilometers existing wet mills. TechnoServe is currently working with 10 Sidamo wet mills to implement appropriate water purification solutions, from constructing shallow evaporation lagoons to installing grass-based wetland treatment systems. TechnoServe will support an additional 20 wet mills implement sustainable water management practices over the next two years.
Partners
Mother Parkers
Supporting Farmer Cooperatives
As part of the Maize Alliance in Ethiopia, TechnoServe is supporting nine farmer-owned cooperative unions, which are...... umbrella organizations for primary cooperatives, to improve their access to markets. Through training and coaching, TechnoServe strengthens the cooperatives’ business and financial management skills as well as implementation capacity, with the immediate objective of delivering on contract agreements to the World Food Programme’s Purchase for Progress (P4P) initiative.
Partners
World Food ProgrammeBlog Posts
April 16, 2013
Tracing Coffee’s Roots in Ethiopia
From coffee farm to coffeehouse, what does it take to bring one of the world’s most popular beverages to consumers? David Farley of AFAR Magazine recently traveled to Ethiopia, the birthplace of coffee, to find out.
March 22, 2013
Photo of the Week: Partnering to Protect Water Resources
On World Water Day, TechnoServe recognizes that water is central to everything we do.
March 21, 2013
A Sustainable Water Solution for Coffee Processing in Ethiopia
As TechnoServe prepares to celebrate World Water Day, we highlight a partnership in Ethiopia that is showing coffee wet mill owners a smarter method for treating wastewater and protecting their watershed.
Contact
TechnoServe Ethiopia
P.O. Box 100598
Tel: +251 1 663 0017 |
Mefthe Tadesse
Country Director |
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