Ethiopia

With funding from USDA, TechnoServe is working to enhance the sustainable competitiveness of the Ethiopian coffee sector through increased productivity, improved supply chain performance, strengthened market linkages, and a more facilitative enabling environment, resulting in an increasingly secure supply of high-quality, sustainable coffee for U.S. and other export markets.

TechnoServe seeks to increase the production of teff, wheat, and maize for more than 200,000 farmers and strengthen the farmers access to output markets.

In 2012, Lubaba Mekonnen, a single parent of two, joined a TechnoServe program that was working with coffee farmers in her community. At the time, she had no regular source of income and was struggling to support her family. Today, her income has increased by 200%, her coffee farm is flourishing, and her son is getting ready to attend university next year.

The inability to access safe, nutritious, and affordable food is a problem for many people across East and Southern Africa, leading to widespread malnutrition in children.

In this Business Fights Poverty article, TechnoServe Global Coffee Director Paul Stewart talks about the link between coffee quality and livelihoods.

In Ethiopia, wild coffee thrives under dense forest canopies. Since 2018, TechnoServe has been working with Partnerships for Forests to support the farmers who grow this coffee, and the diverse habitats they rely on for their livelihoods.

In this series, we check back with TechnoServe program participants who were previously featured on our blog, documenting how their lives have changed and progressed.

In part two of our weeklong series, we highlight our work promoting gender equality and women’s empowerment throughout the coffee value chain.

In part one of our weeklong series, we highlight the ways that training and market connections have created lasting income improvements for small coffee farmers around the world.