For the tenth year running, Vision Group, together with the Embassy of the Netherlands, KLM Airlines, dfcu Bank and Koudijs Animal Nutrition, is running the Best Farmers Competition.
The 2025 competition will run from April to November, with the awards in December. Every week, Vision Group platforms will publish profiles of the farmers. Winners will walk away with sh150m and a fully paid-for trip to the Netherlands.
From struggling to make ends meet to exporting high-quality coffee to markets, the Kibinge Coffee Farmers’ Cooperative has come a long way since its humble beginnings in 1995.
Founded by five determined coffee farmers, the cooperative has grown to over 2,000 members, with the head office at Misanvu village in Kibinge sub-county, Masaka district.
Genesis
The main objective of the cooperative was to get a high return on investment from coffee, explains Sowedi Sserwadda, the chairperson of the cooperative.
“There was only one Asian buyer who paid sh100 per kilogramme of wet coffee,” he says.
The buyer only wanted wet coffee. There were many farmers vying for the Asian buyer and he could not take all the coffee.
Consequently, the remainder would end up being thrown away after developing moulds, causing the farmers to incur losses.
In response, the farmers learnt how to dry their coffee and started selling dried berries called kiboko. The co-operative has a structure that accommodates offices, coffee mills, roaster and trucks used transport raw coffee to the factory and processed coffee to the market.
A second chance for the farmers was forming a group, which morphed into an association and by 2009 it was registered as a co-operative. Today the cooperative has 12 operation zones.
Each zone has three to four villages. Each zone has a nucleus farmer, who is growing the crop on a large scale and provides agronomic assistance to the other members.
The nucleus farmer trains, aggregates the dried coffee and supplies fertilisers and pesticides, among others.
“With assistance from the agronomic experts from the head office, we ensure our members apply the right practices in their gardens from digging the hole to selecting the right planting material. It also includes fertiliser application to ensure high production,” he says.
In 2011, the cooperative started exporting coffee under the fair-trade system. This is a global movement that aims to ensure that producers in developing countries earn a fair price for their products while also protecting the rights of workers and the environment.
It focuses on creating more equitable and sustainable trade relationships, especially for commodities, such as coffee, cocoa and bananas.
Sserwadda says they started with one container of 20 metric tonnes through another company because they did not have an exporter licence.
Fortunately, that same year, they got a licence to export coffee. Today, they export 30-40 containers a year, depending on the season; with major markets in Netherlands, Belgium and Japan.
Membership
The cooperative has 2,407 members in Masaka and neighbouring districts of Sembabule and Lwengo, Sserwadda explains.
To become a member, one pays sh122,500, which includes a registration fee, the purchase of shares, a membership book and the minimum balance on one’s account.
“The cooperative is mainly for coffee farmers, although some members are engaged in other enterprises alongside coffee. We also buy parchment / green beams, or both the members and other coffee farmers who bring their dried coffee to the cooperative’s mill,” he says.
Even farmers who are not yet growing the crop, but are interested in it, are allowed to become members.
One of the benefits of membership is trainings, where one learns the best agronomic practices of growing coffee and varieties suitable for a particular region for high returns.
Extending loans to members
In 2013, the cooperative started a credit scheme to help members get money for operations like buying fertilisers. In 2023, it was elevated to Kibinge Coffee Farmers’ Savings and Credit Society (SACCOS) Limited.
Flavia Nanteza, the manager of the SACCOS, explains that their members can borrow money for personal development and needs.
These include paying school fees, medical bills, buying land and building houses, among others with repayments made during the harvest.
Maintaining quality
Quality is a key aspect of their activities, according to Ashiraf Ssekyayi, the cooperative manager. He explains that quality determines the price the product attracts on the market, thus must be kept at its best at all stages of production.
“Many of our markets are in European countries like Netherlands, Belgium as well as Asia, like Japan, among others. The clients are critical about quality so much so that we send them samples of the product and they confirm if it is acceptable, before shipping,” he says.
Quality starts with the plantlets to best practices, which include application of fertilisers, keeping pests and diseases at bay and proper post-harvest handling by drying the coffee in a clean and safe place to avoid contamination.
“We encourage our members to dry their coffee to a moisture content of 13% and because when it is higher, it can develop moulds, which cause aflatoxins known to be dangerous to the consumers. The cooperative, therefore, employed laboratory experts who check the quality right from moisture levels, where even members can bring the dried beans for checking before delivery for processing,” Ssekyayi adds.
After processing the coffee, they get a sample to check for moisture content and contamination, which must be lower than 40%.
If it is higher, the cooperative does not buy the coffee, explains Sharifah Nakawoza, a laboratory technician at the cooperative.
“We also taste the aroma. Some farmers store their coffee in the same room as their motorcycles whose fuel and fumes affect the aroma of the crop,” she explains.
After ensuring that the coffee is of good quality, we roast and mill it into a beverage; we also package in different quantities.
Marketing
Sekyayi explains that they aggregate over 900 trillion tonnes a year with their main market for their coffee is Europe and Japan, where they sell parchment coffee priced according to the screen size, that is 18, 15 and 12.
“When we get a client, we enter into an agreement stipulating the screen size, the qualities and frequency for supply,” he says.
They also have a local market for both parchment sold at UGACOF. They also have a beverage branded Kibinge Coffee which is sold in supermarkets and retail shops in Kampala and Masaka cities.
Benefiting the community
Community members, Sserwadda says, benefit in several ways from the co-operative. They can access quality coffee plantlets from the cooperative’s nursery bed, training and supplies like fertilisers.
This has generally boosted coffee growing and the harvest in Masaka.
From the money received from the fair trade, they have a number of community out-reach activities, such as paying school fees for four children, buying water tanks for public schools and connecting electricity to Mirambi health centre III to improve service delivery.
Challenges
The biggest challenge the co-operative suffers, Sekyayi says, is farmers not adhering to the set standards. For example, they harvest unripe coffee, which tarnishes the quality.
They also face a challenge of fake inputs that have led farmers to incur losses. They invest heavily in inputs like fertilisers and pesticides, among others, which are not effective and thus have to keep buying more or getting low returns from their farms.
“We also have a challenge of climatic change, such as dry spells. With good practices, our coffee always has good fruiting, but when the dry season sets in, the berries do not form well, which results in small berries giving us screen 12, which has low prices and black coffee which is not sold,” he says.
The other challenge is working capital, since coffee business requires huge amounts of money.
This leaves the coffee business in hands of big players, who at times are not selling purely Ugandan coffee, but rather use it to blend into coffee from other countries.
Plans
The cooperative’s plan is to set up a one-stop-centre, according to Ssekyayi.
At the centre, coffee would be processed into parchment, roasting, milling into powder to grading.
“We want to set up a grading machine at the factory since currently we transport our coffee for export to Kampala for grading, which increases the expenditure and reduces the profits,” he says.
Benefits to members
M embers are prohibited from selling unprocessed coffee.
To ensure this, their coffee is transported to the factory where it is milled by the cooperative on credit. When the product is sold, the cost of processing it is deducted and the farmer pays the rest.
Sowedi Sserwadda, the chairperson of the cooperative says this is to prevent the sale of unprocessed coffee which does not meet the value-addition costs. At the cooperative, a kilogramme of parchment goes for sh15,000.
“Previously, members and coffee farmers would buy poor quality seedlings that led to low yields,” he says.
The farmers set up a mother garden that is pest and disease-free from which they acquire suckers used to propagate quality plantlets.
These are sold to members and also to other farmers intending to venture into coffee at sh1,000 and sh2,000. Each planting season, the cooperative distributes an average of 50,000 plantlets to members.
Through the fair-trade system, the fair price allows them to get extra money, which the association uses to run some operations like managing the nursery bed.
To encourage farmers to pursue other enterprises alongside coffee farming, the cooperative also helps manage shambas on behalf of their owners who do not have time.
“The co-operative and farmer enter into a five-y ear agreement and the cost is deducted at harvest,” Sserwadda says.
