Coffee farmers to weed out cartels with sales training

A Kenyan based not-for- profit organisation is set to put up the first coffee academy in Kenya as it targets to train farmers, especially youth and women on marketing skills to free them from the yoke of cartels.

Beansitute Academy will be established by the Fair Trade Organisation of Kenya (FTOK) to create awareness on the great income that the crop has if they have the right knowledge.

Kenya’s coffee industry is dominated by cartels who have been exploiting farmers by offering low prices on their produce.

The academy, which is expected to open in August, will train farmers on coffee cupping, grading, barista skills as well as value addition.

Students will have to part with a yet-to-be-determined subsidised fee for training.

Cupping is the process that determines how much money farmers will earn from their crop as it ranks the coffee basing on the quality.

Kenya has only one certified cupping specialist who is hired by different organisations for testing the quality of coffee and farmers are not aware of the actual value of their crop, the measuring is done in their absence.

“This academy will, among other things, train farmers on cupping of coffee and this will enable them to reconcile results given by marketers and what they would have found in their testing and this will help them to know the actual value of their crop,” said Francis Kioko, co-founder FTOK.  

This training will help farmers to make an informed decision on the coffee that they release forsale and cut dependence on marketers, he added.

The organisation has been working with farmers before but on agronomical practices, which they say the growers have so far perfected, hence the need to move to the next level of creating awareness on the marketing to enable them get the true value of their produce.

“Kenya coffee producers have for the main part played a role in coffee production and understand and very little about trade let alone taste of their product,” says Anne Mukua, a co-founder member of the organisation.

The target is to train approximately 500 young coffee professionals in the country as well as farmers’ cooperative societies. The youth will mainly be trained on entrepreneurial skills such as becoming baristas.

The Beansitute alumni will help create a new breed of coffee professionals who will grow domestic consumption and help facilitate healthier relations between producers and the market.

“Kenya youth have very low interest in the coffee value chain mainly because it is presumed unprofitable, labor intensive and to many ‘uncool’,” she said.