Virunga National Park Coffees

The park is also embarking on a major agriculture programme, with the vision of boosting the livelihoods of smallholder farmers who live around the park by investing in the production and marketing of their food crops and their cash crops, including coffee. In this way the pressures on farmers to encroach on the park to extract wood for charcoal will be reduced, and farmers will see positive benefits from the park’s presence.

Coffee project with farm africa

The borders of the Virunga National Park, including the slopes of the Rwenzori Mountains and the uplands to the north-west of Lake Edward, contain some of the finest Arabica coffee growing land in the world. The climate is temperate with plentiful rainfall and sunshine, volcanic soils, as well as altitudes rising to over 2,000 metres. Smallholder farmers here have long grown heirloom bourbon varieties, but until very recently postharvest processing was very basic and the only buyers were informal traders, mainly coming from neighbouring Uganda.

The aim of the Virunga National Park coffee programme is to enable farmers to realise the full potential of their coffees. Overall, the programme will boost the livelihoods of more than 7,000 coffee farming families living on the border of the national park. The farmers are already organised at village level, around smallscale coffee washing stations, and are affiliated to two vibrant young cooperatives, Kawa Kanzururu and Coopade, based close to Beni and Butembo respectively, for milling and export.

The project will strengthen their business at each level, from farm management to production and business systems, while building a strong profile and presence in international markets.

The project approach is based on implementing a holistic and sustainable farming model, including crop diversification, establishing a balance between food security and cash generation, as well as training on good agricultural practices and the establishment of nurseries for coffee as well as other trees. There is also a strong emphasis on increasing the quantity and quality of the fully washed Arabica produced by the cooperatives. This will be achieved through upgrading processing and storage capacity, installing cupping labs, and through training in quality management, evaluation and control at each level from farmer to export. The business management capacities of the cooperatives will be strengthened, including the governance issues entailed in operating a complex business, and the cooperatives’ ability to secure working capital. The cooperatives will be supported to understand and operate successfully in international markets, with the aim of establishing linkages with importers, roasters, brands and retailers through long-term business partnerships.

In July 2016, Coopade create a Women’s Section with the objective of allowing women coffee farmers to control and develop their own coffee production through the whole chain from production through to export. As the women in DR Congo already do the largest proportion of the work the coffee farms, including harvest, this has meant focusing on the delivery of the coffee cherries to the washing station, and then managing the actual washing and drying of the parchment coffee. The Women’s Section have built a total of seven of the fifteen Coopade washing stations to date, of which Kirindera was one of the first. These washing stations are entirely managed by the Women’s Section. Their aims are to improve both coffee yields and coffee quality, and so to secure better livelihoods for their families.

2020 is the first year in which some of Coopade’s coffee produced by women has been kept separate from the rest of the cooperative’s production and marketed with its own identity. It is being produced and sold with pride – pride in its high quality and in the organisational efforts that have made it possible. It is being sold with a small premium that will boost the women’s incomes. 

We have asked Gisele Kahindo why the women of Kirindera chose to call their coffee Women’s Peace Coffee: