GENEVA, SWITZERLAND, September 19, 2018 – A delegation of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) conducted a site visit to Sucafina’s operations in Burundi, on the 5th and 6th of September, as part of the Burundi Coffee Alliance (BCA) project monitoring – funded by USAID and implemented by the Kahawatu Foundation, Sucafina’s Sustainability Implementer.
During the tour, USAID representatives, who were accompanied by the Kahawatu and Sucafina teams, stopped to meet with the members of Rama Dufatanemunda Association, a group of female coffee producers supported by the Kahawatu Foundation.
The women were happy to announce that they had sold their first-ever crop of coffee and were able to generate income from it.
They provided the Mubuga Washing Station, owned by Bugestal – Sucafina’s subsidiary in Burundi, with all the coffee cherries they had harvested this year to be processed as natural coffee.
“We are very thankful to Kahawatu for the support. As a result of the training sessions, women are now financially independent. At family and individual farms, we are applying knowledge of Good Agricultural Practices, which have seen the production of coffee increase from 0.7/kg per tree to an average of 2kg/tree. Our living conditions have improved and we are better now than before Kahawatu’s intervention,” says Nizigiyimana Françoise, Rama President.
Rama Dufatanemunda Association was established with the help of the Kahawatu Foundation. Today, it has more than 130 members. Since women in Burundi are not entitled to own land, Kahawatu took it upon itself to support the Association and lobbied for it to obtain the Provincial authorization to borrow a piece of land to grow coffee. Kahawatu also enabled the women of Rama to diversify food production and sources of income.
