Specialty green coffee traders, sourcing from 26 origins on behalf of over 1000 roasters.

Date

Falcon and Girls Gotta Run
Girls Gotta Run 2010

ETHIOPIA: The Girls Gotta Run Foundation is a non-profit organisation which promotes athletic excellence through running and education to empower young women and their communities in Ethiopia. Falcon has proudly supported GGRF since 2013, providing annual funding and helping to generate a platform of promotion through our network of roaster clients around the world.


ESG(s): Social

Origin: Ethiopia: Soddo, Bekoji, Oromiapia

Timeline: 2013, on-going

Gender: 100% female


2023 Highlights


• 200 girls and 80 mothers registered (100 girls and 40 mothers in both Soddo and Bekoji).

• Over $18k raised for International Day of the Girl 2023, including $1k raised directly by Falcon staff.


The Girls Gotta Run Foundation is a non-profit organisation which promotes athletic excellence through running and education to empower young women and their communities in Ethiopia. The organisation provides schooling, life skills and scholarships to girls and young women, and financial management and entrepreneurship programs for their mothers.

Falcon has proudly supported GGRF since 2013, providing annual funding and helping to generate a platform of promotion through our network of roaster clients around the world. In previous years, Falcon have been making donations to the cause, either via the sale of specific Ethiopian coffees, or via one-off payments. The program has special resonance among our roasting community, many of whom understand and promote the opportunities for social mobility through sport, especially in and around coffee growing regions and communities. Coffee roasters and consumers have in recent years played an integral part in supporting GGRF, either by buying our related coffees, running and raising money for the International Day of the Girl fundraisers, and by helping spread the word far and wide.

In 2020, Falcon decided to make our donation more tangible by directly sponsoring 10 young women in the scholarship program. The sponsorship helped fund the girls’ education, athletic training, daily nutrition, and equipment and materials relating to the course. As a way of further promoting the incredible work that GGRF does, we took the additional step of naming ten of the fantastic lots we sourced from Mustefa Abakeno during that season, after each of the young women we sponsor in the program. Each of the different lots were separated at farm level for complete transparency and each different lot carries the first name of a girl in the program and a character descriptor, supplied by GGRF, to represent each of their distinct personalities and interests.

The pandemic years of 2020 and 2021 left no community untouched, but in spite of this GGRF kept going with its work to support the girls and mothers of vulnerable communities in parts of Ethiopia, even amongst the civil conflict the country experienced at this time. In 2021, GGRF athletes participated in various short and medium races (100 – 3 000 meters). 7 girls joined clubs administered by professional international and national coaches under the regulation of regional sport commissions. 10 girls participated in regional, zonal and Woreda administrative level competitions. 3 girls attended a National Girls’ Forum hosted by The Malala Foundation in Addis Ababa for 5 days, which included the opportunity to network with other girls. All participant girls received life skills training, which brought attitudinal changes and information sharing with their families and local communities. All girls succeeded in scoring good academic results and passed to the next class year

In 2022:
• 135 girls registered in the Soddo region and 120 girls in Bekoji for the 2022-23 school year.

• 1 new field officer employed to drive recruitment in the Oromia region, directly supported by Falcon.

• $10k raised in celebration of UNICEF’S International Day of the Girl, including $1k raised directly by Falcon staff.