How Ugandan women are taking control of the coffee business

Meridah Nandudu envisioned a coffee sisterhood in Uganda, and the strategy for expanding it was simple: Pay a higher price per kilogram when a female grower took the beans to a collection point. It worked. More and more men who typically made the deliveries allowed their wives to go instead. Nandudu’s business group now includes more than 600 women, up from dozens in 2022. That’s about 75% of her Bayaaya Specialty Coffee’s pool of registered farmers in this mountainous area of eastern Uganda that produces prized arabica beans and sells to exporters.

Nandudu says traditionally women have done the hard work, but have not had control of the money. “Initially, women had been so discouraged about coffee in a way that when you look at coffee value chain, it's the women who do the donkey work. It is the women that are planting, when it comes to weeding, harvesting, pulping, fermentation, washing and our fathers come at the point when this coffee is ready for selling,” she explains. Nandudu's goal is to reverse that imbalance in labour and financial control in a business which can't run without women. According to the US Department of Agriculture, Uganda is the second highest coffee producer in Africa, after Ethiopia.

The east African country exported more than 6 million bags of coffee between September 2023 and August 2024, accounting for $1.3 billion in earnings, according to the Uganda Coffee Development Authority. The earnings have been rising as production has been dwindling in Brazil, which is the world’s top coffee producer, due to unfavourable drought conditions. Nandudu grew up in In Sironko district, a remote village near the Kenya border where coffee is the community's lifeblood. As a child, when she was not at school, she helped her mother and other women look after acres of coffee plants, weeding and labouring with the pulping, fermenting, washing and drying the coffee.

According to Nandudu, the harvest season was known to coincide with a surge in cases of domestic violence, as couples fought over how much of the earnings men brought home from sales — and how much they didn't. “We came up with an idea where a woman’s coffee was fetching a slightly higher price than that one of a man. It was particularly 200 shillings, if a woman delivered coffee, it would earn that family 200 shillings plus on a kilo, so that motivated the men to trust their women to sell the coffee.

So, when the women sell the coffee, she has a hand in it, she knows how much we have sold this coffee, and when they come back at home they are able to sit and are able to discuss. So, through this we have witnessed low reduction levels of gender based violence in our communities and then the women have been empowered,” says Nandudu. Nandudu earned her degree in the social sciences from Uganda’s top public university in 2015, with her father funding her education from coffee earnings. She wanted to launch a company that would prioritize the needs of coffee-producing women in the country's conservative society. She thought of her project as a kind of sisterhood and chose “Bayaaya" — which translates as brotherhood or sisterhood in the Lumasaba language — for her company's name.

It launched in 2018, operating like others that buy coffee directly from farmers and process it for export. But Bayaaya is unique in Mbale, the largest city in eastern Uganda, for focusing on women and for initiatives such as a cooperative saving society that members can contribute to and borrow from. For small-holder Ugandan farmers in remote areas, a small movement in the price of a kilogram of coffee is a major event. The decision to sell to one or another middleman often hinges on small price differences.

A decade ago, the price of coffee bought by a middleman from a Ugandan farmer was roughly 8,000 Uganda shillings, or just over $2 at today’s exchange rate. Now the price is roughly $5. Nandudu adds an extra 200 shillings to the price of every kilogram she buys from a woman. It’s enough of an incentive for more women to join the company. Another benefit is a small bonus payment during the off-season from February to August.

Nandudu says: “It is important for us as women to be engaged in the coffee value chain. One is, as we all know traditionally we woman are like caretakers, we are managers it’s us basically to manage whatever activities are happening at home, always our husbands are always not at home so we are the ones that go to the farm, we are planting, we are the ones that are doing the weeding, we harvest the coffee with our children, we are able to pulp this coffee, and then we are able to ferment, we are washing the coffee so we are providing a support system to our husbands - so a woman is very important in the coffee value chain.”

That motivates many local men to trust their women to sell coffee Nandudu believes. Nandudu’s group has many collection points across eastern Uganda, and women trek to them at least twice a week. Men are not turned away. Juliet Kwaga, is one of the women who believes the coffee production is changing her life around. Kwaga, remembers her father was always in control. She says: “A lot of things have changed. I can talk about my story, when I grew up by then mum was not participating in this coffee things, her work was only to be at home as you know those are those days, but now these days things have changed because of sensitizing. We receive a lot of people who come talk to us, talk to families and in that process, we have seen a lot of changes, changes in families.”

Now, Kwaga's husband, with a bit of encouragement, is comfortable sending her. “ She rejoices at the independence she now has to take care of her children. “I can buy food in a home as a woman, I can take my children to school as a woman and still I also have some money as a woman in the home. It is not like I am depending on my husband for everything, I want a book for my child or I am sick, such things, such easy easy things that I have to provide for myself,” she says. In Sironko district, home to more than 200,000 people, coffee trees dot the hilly terrain. Much of the farming is on plots of one or two acres, although some families have larger tracts.

Many farmers don’t usually drink coffee, and some have never tasted it. But things are slowly changing. Routine coffee drinkers are emerging among younger women in the coffee business in urban areas, including at a roasting place in Mbale where most employees are women. For Nandudu, who aims to start exporting beans, that's progress. Now there are more women in “coffee as a business,” she says.