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NUCAFE

Deliverables

Training curriculum for coffee farmers – This curriculum will specifically focus on providing business managers and farmer-leaders with participatory-based research activities that will draw away from the commonly used banking model of education in current trainings.

Training curriculum for other farmers – This curriculum will replicate the updated activity-based style of curriculum and elements of financial literacy found in the updated coffee farmer curriculum. This curriculum will be tailored to alternative cash crops,  make it possible for farmers specializing in cash crops aside from coffee to receive the training, support, and services that coffee farmers working with NUCAFE have been able to receive.

Assessment Toolkit – Our toolkit provides NUCAFE with assessment tools that allow them to measure the effectiveness of their training and the satisfaction of farmers that attend them. This will be presented in the form of phone surveys that will be delivered quarterly and delivered in English, Luganda, and Lukonjo. These surveys will allow NUCAFE to quickly update its curriculums to maximize efficiency and understanding.

Mission

To establish a market-driven system of coffee farmer enterprises and organizations which are empowered to increase their household incomes through enhanced entrepreneurship and innovation.

Challenge

Smallholder coffee farmers have been taken advantage of by middlemen who keep the majority of the wealth tied to the profits generated from coffee sales, leading to a perpetual cycle of poverty within these agriculturally based communities.

Research Activities

To improve the efficiency of NUCAFE’s farmer trainings, we interviewed the management team members in NUCAFE. We interviewed the leaders in charge of each separate curriculum focus as well as those in charge of collecting feedback data to create a foundation for our updated curriculums and assessment materials. In addition, we conducted a phone survey across three farming cooperatives, covering the experiences of 600 cooperatives members, to measure the effectiveness of trainings and farmers’ satisfaction to give us a clear understanding of the status of the current trainings available.

Key Findings

  1. Trainings are too lecture-heavy – There is a lack of active participation in farmer trainings that limits farmers’ retention of trainings and limits their ability to develop valuable skills such as problem-solving and critical thinking.
  2. Concepts are lost in translation – Information and understanding are lost as lessons are transferred downward through NUCAFE’s organizational hierarchy due to language barriers on the farmer level.
NUCAFE High Resolution Logo option 2

Team

2021

Social Enterprise:
NUCAFE

Fellows:

Sureena Mann
Biology, Public Health
LinkedIn

Nick Roland
Finance
LinkedIn