In coffee-producing Uganda, an emerging ‘sisterhood’ wants more women involved

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SIRONKO, Uganda (AP) — Meridah Nandudu envisioned a coffee sisterhood in Uganda, and the strategy for expanding it was simple: Pay a higher price per kilogram when a female grower took the beans to a collection point.

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It worked. More and more men who typically made the deliveries allowed their wives to go instead.

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Nandudu’s business group now includes more than 600 women, up from dozens in 2022. That’s about 75% of her Bayaaya Specialty Coffee’s pool of registered farmers in this mountainous area of eastern Uganda that produces prized arabica beans and sells to exporters.

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“Women have been so discouraged by coffee in a way that, when you look at (the) coffee value chain, women do the donkey work,” Nandudu said. But when the coffee is ready for selling, men step in to claim the proceeds.

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Her goal is to reverse that trend in a community where coffee production is not possible without women’s labor.

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Uganda is one of Africa’s top two coffee producers, and the crop is its leading export. The east African country exported more than 6 million bags of coffee between September 2023 and August 2024, accounting for $1.3 billion in earnings, according to the Uganda Coffee Development Authority.

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The earnings have been rising as production dwindles in Brazil, the world’s top coffee producer, which faces unfavorable drought conditions.

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In Sironko district, where Nandudu grew up in a remote village near the Kenya border, coffee is the community’s lifeblood. As a girl, when she was not at school, she helped her mother and other women look after acres of coffee plants. They usually planted, weeded and toiled with the post-harvest routine that includes pulping, fermenting, washing and drying the coffee.

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The harvest season was known to coincide with a surge in cases of domestic violence, she said. Couples fought over how much of the earnings that men brought home from sales — and how much they didn’t.

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“When (men) go and sell, they are not accountable. Our mothers cannot ask, ‘We don’t have food at home. You sold coffee. Can you pay school fees for this child?”‘ she said.

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Years later, Nandudu earned her degree in the social sciences from Uganda’s top public university in 2015, with her father funding her education from coffee earnings. She had the idea to launch a company that would prioritize the needs of coffee-producing women in the country’s conservative society.

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She thought of her project as a kind of sisterhood and chose “bayaaya” — a translation in the Lumasaba language — for her company’s name.

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It launched in 2018, operating like others that buy coffee directly from farmers and process it for export.

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But Bayaaya is unique in Mbale, the largest city in eastern Uganda, for focusing on women and for initiatives such as a cooperative saving society that members can contribute to and borrow from.