Kikobero is located high on the slopes of Uganda’s Mount Elgon, in Uganda’s Bulambuli region. The small village is home to Kikobero Coffee, one of the country’s new specialty coffee companies trying to live up to its claim as one of the world’s top beverage purveyors.
Martin Nangoli, the founder, invites us to his mother’s house. It is here, he says, that the foreign business associates he had invited to lunch a few years earlier first tasted his mother’s coffee and noticed how unique it was.
Nangoli and other smallholders grow the highly prized single-origin Arabica variety that thrives at elevations above 1,500 metres. While Uganda is believed to have originated the Robusta coffee variety – now widespread around the world – it is Arabica, with its smoothness and rich, full-bodied flavor that fetches the best prices in world markets for quality coffee.
After sharing a hot meal of matoke plantain, chicken, and avocados, he shows us the coffee trees “older than my father” that line the yard. In the Masira sub-country where Kikobero is based, coffee farming has a long history as part of a mixed horticultural tradition, but Martin says it took a trip to the UK after visiting his overseas partners to fully open his eyes to the yield potential of the crop.
He shared his discovery with his community and today coffee bean exports make up about 90% of the village’s source of income, with less than 10% coming from other fruits, vegetables and animal products.
With the proceeds from the coffee, Martin Nangoli has set up two schools in the area, a remarkable achievement for a location so far from the larger town of Mbale. The plant itself has become an important part of the children’s education.
The view from Martin Nangoli’s house on the high slopes of Mount Elgon. (Photo: Jamila Versi)
The village chief, Peter Masaba, shows us two coffee trees near the school. One of these trees has deliberately been deprived of fertilizer and is weak. Another is fed regularly and blooms profusely. This not only shows the children what happens when you don’t take care of the tree, but also what happens when you don’t feed the spirit enough. The children learn how to plant and care for seedlings from an early age, something that will help them when they go to agricultural training later on.
Kikobero is one of a growing number of cooperatives that have discovered the value of growing Arabica coffee at higher altitudes. This has brought a significant new cohort of farmers to traditional Robusta coffee farming in the country at lower levels.
The seedlings were provided free of charge by the Ugandan Coffee Development Agency (UCDA). Founded in 1991, the agency has been actively working to “improve the marketing of coffee to optimize foreign exchange earnings for the country and payments to farmers”.
Uganda is still largely an agricultural country. Coffee, accounting for about 22% of total agricultural exports, is the main cash crop and 1.9 million households in Uganda depend directly or indirectly on coffee.
Dramatic increase in exports
There has been a dramatic increase in Ugandan coffee export revenue – it exported 6.26 million 60kg bags and earned $862.28 million in 2022 compared to $559.16 million in the previous year. This was the highest figure ever achieved in any year and has sharpened the ambition to raise the bar even higher. The plan is to increase production to 20 million bags by 2030 with an expected profit of about $2.5 billion.
Dr. Emmanuel Iyamulemye, the UCDA’s managing director, says added value in Ugandan coffee, whether as roasted beans or instant coffee, is essential to promoting the Ugandan brand globally. Uganda has struggled to promote its value-added coffee in Western markets due to high taxation on value-added coffee.
Last year, Uganda left the International Coffee Organization (ICO), calling Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni “a slave organization.” The government cited “restrictions on the export of processed coffee” and “unfair tariffs” as two of the seven reasons for leaving the ICO.
Iyamulemye believes that the African Continental Free Trade Agreement (AfCFTA) and in particular the Inter-African Coffee Organization has remarkable potential to expand markets for Ugandan coffee. He says, “We are currently looking at trading products internally with 0% rates.”
The UCDA is specifically looking for trade in North African countries, such as Egypt, Morocco and Algeria.
Endiro Coffee not only grows and exports high quality coffee, but also brings it to Uganda’s growing middle class in coffee shops across the country. (Photo: Jamila Versi)
Expansion of the domestic market
Milly Drijaru is a quality controller who was part of Endiro coffee Since its creation in 2011 by Gloria Katusiime. Endiro, a full-scale tree-to-cup operation with 518 Ugandan women, recently signed a deal to stock their excellent coffee at American supermarket chain Trader Joe’s in the Midwestern United States. Endiro’s profits go to the fight against the vulnerability of children.
Drijaru and farmer Alice explain how important it is that the women are directly employed: as land in Uganda is traditionally owned by men, “women would work all day on the farms… but the men would spend it on booze. Now the woman takes care of it, uses it for her children and keeps the money.”
While growing coffee has been a Ugandan tradition for a long time, it is only considered a cash crop for use by others and local consumption is limited. Endiro Coffee is trying to reverse this trend and appeal to the growing middle class by opening coffee shops all over the country.
They prepare lattes, flat whites and other own brand varieties with names like “You Fil Dis Mocha” and “Flava In Da Caramel en Vanilla Latte”. They also recently signed a partnership agreement with Shell Petroleum, which will start selling their coffee at gas stations.
Likewise, Mountain Harvest Coffee, which works with 36 groups of smallholder farmers on Mount Elgon, is targeting a larger domestic market. While visiting one of the small-scale farms, Kenneth Barigye, General Manager of Mountain Harvest, asks his farmers how many of them drink coffee. Almost all hands shoot into the air. “Good, good,” says Barigye, “an improvement.”
Keen to expand locally and to other African countries, Mountain Harvest Coffee aims to do so by producing instant coffee and introducing it to more areas. Most recently, their barista, Ibra Kiganda, won the title of Africa’s Best Barista at the February 2023 African Barista Championship.
Farmer Janette and Agnes, project manager of Mountain Harvest Coffee, pose in front of coffee trees on Janette’s thriving farm. (Photo: Jamila Versi)
Local farmers who work with Mountain receive crops on loan instead of money. Farmer Janette proudly showed us her thriving farm where, in addition to coffee, she also grows avocados, macadamia nuts, bananas and jackfruit and is building an impressive new home.
The organization works with the neighboring agricultural universities and, together with the UCDA, invites 20 bright students to six months of management training, after which a certain number are selected to join the organization.
One of them is Agnes Kemigisha, who at the age of 25 has now been working for Mountain Harvest for a year as a project manager, coordinating between different groups of small farmers. She is very happy with her job, she says, and believes that agriculture is the future of the youth.
The G25 African Coffee Summit will be held in Kampala later this year. And while the coffee companies work hard not only for their income, but also to ensure a good livelihood for their farmers and villages, Ugandan coffee is just beginning to conquer the world.
