Coffee firm trains 40,000 farmers under Bill & Melinda Gates support

The Coffee Partnership for Tanzania (CPT) has trained more than 40, 000 farmers in crop growing areas for the past two years under the support of Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Speaking in an exclusive interview with The Guardian from German yesterday, CPT Project Director Ian Lachmund said that currently there are more than 400,000 coffee farmers in Tanzania, but only 40,000 have been trained by the partnership.

“So far, we have supported more than 40,000 farmers to organise themselves in groups, trained them on good agricultural practices and provided a large number of different ways of support to producers,” he said.  He added: “And we also provide supportive infrastructure like central processing units, nurseries and others have been installed and benefited many small-scale coffee producers”.  He went on to say that nearly 20,000 farmers have achieved certification during the first two years of the projects tenure. CPT was established in November 2012. 

“We have recently launched an Innovation Voucher Scheme to support additional smallholder farmers with further Tanzanian partners and (together with our partners at the Tanzania Coffee Board, Café Africa and IDH - the Sustainable Trade Initiative) have begun to work on building a National Sustainability Curriculum within a “Sustainable Coffee Programme,” he said.

He noted: “So there is a lot happening, and the sector – including the producers, the government, TaCRI, the Coffee Board, and the sector’s zonal committees – are well participating in this project.” Lachmund said the partnership is solid in helping the farmers to build strong and well established producer organisations and in improving productivity, quality and linkages to reliable markets.

“CPT’s extension system comprises agronomists from the three implementing partners. Farmers are organised in producer organisations (POs) and each group selects lead farmers who would be key extension agents. For their part, lead farmers are supported and trained by agronomists from implementing partners,” he said.  He underscored that another major way of supporting coffee producers is by supplying to smallholder farmers new planting materials, which have improved characteristics, among them being resistant to diseases.

The joint efforts are coordinated by DEG and all CPT implementing partners, who together with TechnoServe will provide their training experiences as inputs in the guideline, the project director pointed out. “Another crucial issue in the CPT is the improvement of gender relations within coffee households using change agents or gender champions, seminars and farmers’ field schools. CPT is targeting to reach 30 percent of women as beneficiaries of GAPs training. It also envisions diversifying income in coffee households as a result of gender related initiatives,” he said.

In order to ensure the project is successful, a rigid monitoring and evaluation system has been established and its purpose is both to assess if the project activities are actually succeeding in improving farmers’ and their families’ livelihoods and to get feedback from beneficiaries of the project on how services delivered by the project can be further refined to benefit farmers, he said. 

The CPT has since conducted a baseline survey in November 2012 with farmers in all major project implementation areas against which the impact will be measured at the end of the project’s tenure due next year. One of the key findings of the baseline report is the average yield of CPT coffee farmers which is 0.3kg of parchment per tree.

 Set up in November 2011, the main goal of CPT is to double coffee yields within the project tenure of 4 years.  It works together with three implementing partners – Tutunze Kahawa Limited, Coffee Management Services (CMS) and Hanns R. Neumann Stiftung (HRNS), who currently have their operations in Kilimanjaro, Arusha, Mbeya, Ruvuma and Kigoma regions. 

In August 2013, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and IDH's Sustainable Coffee Programme convened a workshop in Dar es Salaam to define a set of shared outcomes for coffee initiatives in East Africa and develop common key performance indicators (KPIs) for evaluating them.