How Ugandan Women are Assuming Leadership Roles in the Coffee Industry
The plan to develop Meridah Nandudu’s coffee sisterhood in Uganda was straightforward: When a female planter brought the beans to a collecting site, pay a greater premium per kilogramme. It was successful. Increasingly, males who usually made the deliveries let their wives go. In 2022, there were just a few women in Nandudu’s business group; today, there are over 600. About 75% of her Bayaaya is that amount.
According to Nandudu, women have historically handled the labour-intensive tasks but not the financial management. At first, women were so demoralised by coffee that, when you look at the coffee value chain, women are the ones who perform the donkey job.
According to the Uganda Coffee Development Authority, the east African nation earned $1.3 billion from the export of more than 6 million bags of coffee between September 2023 and August 2024. Brazil, the world’s largest producer of coffee, has seen a decline in output owing to poor drought conditions, although revenues have been increasing. Coffee is the lifeline of the community in Sironko area, a secluded village close to the Kenyan border, where Nandudu was raised. When she wasn’t in school as a child, she assisted her mother and other women in caring for acres of coffee plants by pulling weeds and helping with the pulping, fermenting, washing, and drying processes.
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