In the devastating wake of Hurricane Maria in 2017, Puerto Rico lost an estimated 80 percent of its coffee trees, crippling an important sector of its economy. This $85 million loss for the country's industry, left farmers struggling to provide for their families.
TechnoServe is working with Nespresso to source high-quality coffee from Kenya and Ethiopia, while reducing poverty and improving resilience to climate change for approximately 57,000 households by 2020.
TechnoServe, in partnership with Kellogg’s Company, launched a program in 2015 to improve smallholder livelihoods in the Lambasi area of the Eastern Cape Province, which has the highest poverty levels in the country. The project seeks increase productivity of maize farmers in the area, as well as facilitating market connections and improve their resiliency to climate change.
Some of the highest quality coffee in the world comes from the Sidama Zone of Ethiopia, produced primarily by 200,000 smallholder farming families, most of whom continue to live in poverty due to small farm sizes and low productivity. Beginning in 2013, TechnoServe in partnership with IDH, Nestlé and Nestlé Nespresso is working to increase the income of these farmers by increasing the supply of high-quality, sustainable produce coffee.
Ethiopia is the largest exporter of Arabica coffee in Africa, with 70 percent of exports being unwashed coffee. With support from Jacobs Douwe Egberts (JDE) and IDH, TechnoServe is looking to make the unwashed coffee sector in Ethiopia's Jimma, Lekempti and Sidama regions more sustainable.
TechnoServe is working with five Farmer Producer Companies (FPCs) in the districts of Guna, Narsinghpur, Vidisha, Sheopur and Dindori in Madhya Pradesh in the wheat and maize value chains, helping to build them into sustainable businesses that work to the benefit of their member farmers.
TechnoServe is demonstrating and refining scalable actions for inclusive, sustainable growth and competitiveness of the Guar market system in India.
In Ethiopia’s Sidama coffee region, hundreds of millions of liters of wastewater and coffee pulp are accidentally discharged into the rivers during coffee processing. Since 2012, Mother Parkers Tea & Coffee and TechnoServe have partnered on the Water Wise Coffee project to to protect the rivers by implementing sustainable water management practices.
