When we visited Uganda last year, severe poverty was still a striking thing, even when it had not been the first visit. Three things came to mind:

1. Do these coffee farmers really want to be a coffee farmer, or do they need to be?

2. How can we make an impact via our coffee buying, when the market is so high?

3. How to fit our approach to what the roaster and consumer market wants?

In a situation of extreme poverty, survival is what counts. You want your kids to go to school, and the school fees need to be paid. You work with a cash crop to cover for those bills, and the other crops of the farm are for daily food. The cash crop is often coffee, and even more so often, little pride is taken into it. You just have to do it.How to make impact via our buying

The microstation model of Zombo Coffee Partners reaches a lot of people. Many smallholder farmers are connected to the microstations where they deliver their coffee. With the geographical span and the different specializations of these microstations, the taste profiles differ quite a bit.

This is good for a mixed portfolio of flavors. However, you end up buying a little bit everywhere. And when the market is as high as it has been, the competition pays the same, just to get “coffee” in a tight market, it makes your proposal and connection to the coffee producers limited. 

On the other hand, the This Side Up network believes and lives strongly in integrated value chains, where a coffee consumer and a coffee farmer will be connected year on year. In order to make that happen here, we decided to focus on one microstation, the Ndhew microstation.

It has several small villages connected to it, amongst them the village where the Basic Income project is being done. It’s also the village that for the last few years, had been performing very well on the cupping table. It was also this fact that led us to selecting it as the starting place of the project.

For the first time this year, we are buying coffees from different buying points within the Ndhew Microstation instead of bulking it. We call them microlots. It gives us several things: 

• the ability to give quicker feedback on quality and consistency - rewarding farmers that do well and inform those that need to improve 

• the opportunity to give second payments for best performing coffee - rewarding doesn’t only come in words 

• a pathway to more tailored coffee processing for roaster clients, as volumes are smaller - connecting the value chain closer together, becoming part of each other’s intimate portfolio 

Following the suggestion of Zombo Coffee Partners, we also have separated them into men and women’s lots, where the women (often single mothers) get a small premium. For the extra work of separating the lots, the microstation gets an extra bonus. For the quality premium, we’re paying $0,20/kg via a “winner takes it all” system, adding a little competition element to it all. This will be transferred once the landed coffees have been cupped, and when we’ve blindly selected a winner.
Next to this, we won’t just abandon the other microstations overnight. We’ll be buying as well from Culamuk, Ajere, Jukia and Ayanvu. If successful, we’ll apply the above approach there as well in the coming years.

Will it all work?

So far the theory. Sounds all good, doesn’t it? Well, the proof is in the pudding. And thankfully, that pre shipment sample pudding tastes sweet! To our own happy surprise, the different buying point microlots taste very different. They’re also small, making it “adoption friendly” for roasters who’d like to add a microlot to their year-on-year portfolio. 

The other fun part is that together with Eight world, we’ve launched a platform page making it possible for roasters to contribute to the basic income part via their own unique way, and thus also making the basic income project directly connected to their microlot coffee! 

We feel we’re a step closer to a tailor-made approach to support our coffee friends in Uganda, via the means our ecosystem can provide in the broadest sense of our diversity. It offers a trajectory for those growers to embark on an upward cycle of quality improvement, more professionalization and most importantly, on a path to something they want to do!