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For every kilogram of coffee we sell, we donate £1 to Farm Africa.
It's a simple arrangement, and we've deliberately kept it that way. No tiers, no qualifying products, no small print about which bags count. Whether you buy a 250g bag or a 1kg one, whether it's a single origin or a blend, a proportion of what you spend goes to Farm Africa. Buy four 250g bags over a few months and that's another pound sent.
What we've written about far less often is what happens at the other end — what Farm Africa actually does with that money, and why we chose them rather than any of the dozens of other worthwhile causes we could have picked.
Why Farm Africa
Farm Africa is a UK-registered charity that has been working with farming communities across eastern Africa for over three decades. Their approach is refreshingly unromantic: help farmers grow more, sell more, and sell for more, while protecting the land they depend on. It isn't emergency relief. It's the slower, less photogenic work of building livelihoods that hold up on their own.
They work across Ethiopia, Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and their remit covers everything from fish farming to rangeland management. But coffee is a significant strand of what they do — and that's the part that made the decision easy for us.
We are, after all, a coffee company. It felt right that the money should follow the crop.
The problem they're working on
Coffee is a valuable crop. Coffee farming is frequently not a valuable job.
Across eastern Africa, a great many smallholders growing arabica live on very little — in some regions, under a dollar a day. The reasons are structural rather than mysterious. Farmers often lack the training and equipment to lift their yields and their cup quality. They have almost no bargaining power when it comes to selling. Prices swing on international exchanges for reasons that have nothing to do with the farm. And a changing climate is making harvests less predictable year on year.
There's a gender dimension too, and it's stark. In many coffee-growing communities women carry out the large majority of the labour — planting, tending, picking, sorting — but are routinely shut out of the selling, which means they have no say in how the income is spent.
The scale of the dependency is worth pausing on. Something in the region of 25% of Ethiopia's population relies on coffee for its livelihood, and almost all of that coffee is grown by smallholders. When the crop underperforms, the effect on a community isn't a bad quarter. It's school fees, food, medicine.
What the work actually looks like
The thing we appreciate most about Farm Africa's coffee programmes is how practical they are. There's very little that could be described as awareness-raising. It's mostly infrastructure, skills and access.
In Ethiopia, Farm Africa works in the Bale Eco-region and the Ilu Ababor Zone, where wild arabica still grows in Afromontane rainforest — genetic material that exists nowhere else on earth. The forest is under real pressure from conversion to farmland. Farm Africa's answer is elegant: make forest coffee profitable enough that farmers have no reason to clear the trees. Their three-year project in Ilu Ababor improved livelihoods for around 4,000 people through sustainable coffee and complementary income streams, and forest management cooperatives have since secured export contracts that put their coffee in front of international buyers for the first time.
In DR Congo, they work alongside the Virunga National Park with cooperatives farming the volcanic slopes on its borders. This is some of the most difficult terrain in the coffee world — armed groups, poor roads, unpredictable everything — and yet the arabica coming out of it is extraordinary. Farm Africa's project there supported over 7,000 coffee-farming families, refining processing methods, establishing nurseries, obtaining Fairtrade and organic certification, and building the sort of long-term buyer relationships that let a cooperative keep trading through instability rather than collapsing at the first disruption.
In Uganda, the focus has been squarely on the gender gap. Farm Africa has supported women to join cooperatives, take up leadership positions, and gain genuine control over the money their labour generates.
One farmer, in her own words
Statistics are useful but they're not persuasive on their own, so here's a single example.
Hildah Turyamusiima farms coffee in the Kanungu District of western Uganda. She grew up in a farming family and loves the work. But in Kanungu, coffee had long been treated as a man's crop, and land is customarily controlled by the eldest man in a household — which left women and younger farmers with very little to build on.
Farm Africa's work in the district tackled that directly. They helped establish voluntary land-use agreements, giving women and young people access to plots for an agreed period, with extension officers on hand to advise on planting and crop management. They set up micro-washing stations, which meaningfully raise the value of arabica before it leaves the community. They trained cooperatives in financial and business management, and connected them to new buyers. They introduced Village Savings and Loan Associations so that households could actually accumulate something.
Hildah is now treasurer of the Banyakinkizi Coffee Producers and Processors Cooperative. She's saving toward building a family home with her husband, and her cooperative is working toward selling directly to exporters for better prices. On the change in her community, she puts it plainly: "we had nothing and now we are seeing an improvement."
That's the shape of it. Not a windfall — a foundation.
Where this connects back to your cup
We want to be honest about the limits here. Farm Africa doesn't grow the coffee we roast, and we're not claiming the £1 from your bag traces to a specific tree. That would be a nice story but it wouldn't be a true one.
What is true is that we sell East African coffee, we make a living from a supply chain that begins with smallholders, and we think a portion of that ought to travel back in the direction it came from. Our African coffee collection exists because the region produces some of the most distinctive coffee in the world — the citrus and florals of our Ethiopia Irgachefe, the winey depth and tart pear of our Ethiopia Limu. Both come from a country where coffee is not a lifestyle product but the backbone of millions of livelihoods.
Supporting Farm Africa is not a substitute for paying properly for coffee — we do both, and the second matters more. But the work they do is precisely the work that makes the specialty market accessible to farmers who'd otherwise be locked out of it: better processing, better organisation, better routes to buyers. Every farmer who makes that leap is one more producer with a genuine choice about who they sell to.
You can read more about the arrangement on our Doing good page, or learn about Farm Africa's coffee programmes directly on the Farm Africa website.
And if you'd like to taste what East Africa does best while you're at it, our full range is in the specialty coffee collection.
