Increasing farmers’ coffee yields and quality has proven to have the biggest direct impact on farmer household income. In partnership with sister company Rwanda Trading Company (RTC), Falcon is committed to forming long-term relationships with the farming communities around RTC’s washing station sites by encouraging farmers to enrol in their coffee Agribusiness Training Programme.
Origin: Rwanda
Timeline: 2013 – ongoing
Partner orgs: Rwanda Trading Company
Budget: $100k per year
People: 42,000 producers
Gender: 30% female
Coffee washing station sites in Rwanda’s growing regions can suffer from poor maintenance and periods of unstable management, which results in periods of instability for the farming communities that rely on them to process their coffee cherries and as an essential source of household income.
Over the past decade, RTC set out to purchase and restore these sites, employing full time staff to manage and maintain them, and re-establishing them as places of stability and a source of seasonal employment for the immediate community. Today, RTC has a supply chain of 32 owned and 25 partner washing stations and continues to focus on investing in programmes that bring positive impact to farmers’ daily lives.
All of Falcon’s specialty Rwandan coffee is purchased through RTC. This ensures transparency, farm level traceability, positive financial impact in the field and the security to farmers of repeat business year after year. Premiums are also paid to farmers at the end of the season.
Agribusiness Training Programme and Farm Productivity
RTC is committed to forming long-term partnerships with the farming communities around each station site, encouraging farmers to enrol in their coffee Agribusiness Training Programme (ATP), which is overseen and run by RTC’s highly trained and experienced team of field officers.
Over 60,000 farmers have successfully passed through the programme over the last twelve years and continue to improve the yield and quality of their coffee. As well as gaining confidence in how to maintain their farms, many farmers have been able to expand and rejuvenate their farms for increased productivity.
The programme provides an initial 2-year period of education that covers aspects of best agronomic practice. This increases both the farmers’ coffee yield and quality, which directly impacts their household income. The training focuses on improving and understanding the benefits of key things such as:
• effective pruning, weeding and spacing of trees
• stumping older trees for regeneration
• better nutrition management through use of fertiliser material
• access to better quality fertiliser
• application of water conservation measures such as mulching
• harvesting best practices
Where needed, RTC also distributes shade trees to farms to improve canopy and encourage farm biodiversity. Training is also provided on financial literacy, money management and saving, as well as education on coffee markets.
Additionally, RTC has reported that frequent interaction through training boosts farmer confidence, and timely payments encourage farmers to not divert to alternative crops.
At the inception of the program, over forty RTC field staff were hired to run the programme, the majority in the field and three at the head office in Kigali leading overall coordination. With most of RTC’s farmers having now completed the training, the program is currently focused on refresher courses and other hands-on activities such as nurseries for seedling distribution and rejuvenation. Washing station managers and their support team support farmers around their sites during the off season.
In addition, depending on the area covered, each station employs site collectors who travel to meet farmers and collect their cherry in instances where access is reduced, or farmers have limited mobility.
In 2020, RTC realised that training alone was not enough, particularly when farmers’ tree stock was very old. What farmers needed were seedlings to expand their farms where they had land available or to replace old trees that were no longer as productive. In 2021, they distributed over 350,000 trees, followed by 1.2M coffee seedlings in 2022, and nearly 2M coffee seedlings in 20231 . They have since propagated over 5 million coffee seedlings of the newly recommended RAB C15 variety. In addition, they have also distributed over 500K shade tree seedlings.
Younger trees on a shaded farm are much more productive, and farmers are already seeing the impact from trees distributed in the first two years. Younger and more productive trees mean farmers are selling more coffee, translating directly into increased income and improvements in their livelihoods. Farmers continue to show appetite for rejuvenating their farms and planting new trees where space allows, and RTC is committed to ensure that farmers continue to access free, quality seedlings both of coffee and shade trees.
Since the programme’s inception it has yielded the following results:
• On average, farmers with similar sized farms have seen yield increases of 161% compared with their production prior to enrolment in the training programme
• In recent years, the average revenue increase per household has been up to 209%
• 60% of the FOB price is paid as farmgate price (first and second payments)
• 67% of participant farmer groups have established savings from the member loan programmes which are used for things like family health insurance, sending children to school, supporting community-owned businesses and infrastructure projects, household improvements and farm expansion and maintenance
Traceability and Access to Finance
To ensure sustainability, one must build transparent systems. Using transactions reports which record participant farmers’ seasonal income during the harvest, RTC has partnered with a local bank to give out pre-season loans to farmers based on their expected earnings for the season. With 100% of coffee being traceable to the farmer, they are now able to provide transaction reports to farmers at the end of the harvest. These reports are useful to both the farmers and especially to banks, which can use them to project farmers’ expected income and provide pre-season loans to over 2,500 farmers every year. The loans accessed through this traceability system are able to support farmers who would otherwise have been excluded from accessing finance2 .
In the pilot year of 2020, over $75,000 was distributed to 500 farmers, and by 2022 the number of farmers with access to financial liquidity had grown to over 1000, with over $200,000 in loans distributed. This year, over $700 000 was distributed to over 2,500 farmers in pre-harvest loans. So far, the repayment rate is above 98%.
In 2017, RTC launched its digital traceability platform and by 2020 had recorded over 3.3 million lbs of green coffee as digitally traceable. In 2021, this increased to over 3.5 million lbs of digitally traceable green coffee.
Since the inception of the company, Rwanda Trading Company has been committed to improving economic freedom and security for smallholder farmers by building resilient and transparent supply chains. Its spirit of continuous improvement will carry this commitment forward into the years ahead.