• Botanisk Varietet: Bourbon
• Prosess: Vaska
• Plukket: 2021/2022
• Kooperativ: Kampani, Horamama Coffee dry mill.
• Cupping score: 84.25

Denne kaffen ble utvalgt som en kaffe som ligger midt mellom spesialkaffe og speciality grade. For å score speciality grade må kaffen tilfredstille over 80 poeng på cupping skjema (speciality coffee cupping protocol). Denne ligger rett under 85 poeng, 84 poeng for å være helt korrekt.

Kaffen ble hentet av ei ganske livlig dame fra Burundi som har en familie der som driver et kooperativ. Via deres nettverk ble kaffen importert. Dette er fra oss et slags brobyggings prosjekt som vi håper å bygge mere på i fremtiden. Brent med hjertet i kaffen hos oss i Jacobsen og svart, Trondheim.

Litt om kaffen.

HORAMAMA COFFEE DRY MILL was set up in January 2016 by the Fairtrade-certified Burundian coffee exporter COCOCA, a union of smallholder cooperatives, to hull and store coffee beans. This activity up to that point was outsourced to third parties. To this end, Horamama acquired an existing hulling plant in Ntarambo in the northern part of Burundi (Kayanza/Ngozi).

Hulling is the last link in the value chain before export and transforms parchment coffee into green coffee. All earlier steps in the process i.e. the production itself and the transformation from cherries into parchment coffee are carried out by the base cooperatives in their own washing stations.

THE SOCIAL IMPACT

COCOCA remains the only cooperative player in the Burundi market to own its own dry mill.  Horamama, in terms of volumes processed, was the largest in Burundi in 2019 as a number of hulling mills went out of business. COCOCA now represents 15% of national production, a 7% increase since the creation of the dry mill. They have increased their membership from 32 cooperatives to 40, representing over 27,000 farmers.

The vertical integration has dramatically improved access to the hulling service for smallholder farmers and their cooperatives, with better processing and storage services. As a result, coffee flows are better rationalized and the removal of the previous bottlenecks has enabled the cooperatives to sell more coffee to COCOCA. The investment has also allowed COCOCA to improve traceability and quality control to better meet the requirements of specialty coffee markets. In 2019, roughly half of the processed volume was Fairtrade or Utz certified. Finally, the added value of the hulling service itself remains within the group.

ome producer organizations in the rural South make impressive social and economic progress. Increasingly, these farmers no longer see themselves as poor –trying to survive– but as ambitious rural entrepreneurs. They are improving the livelihoods of their families and have become catalysts for development in their communities.

Gradually, as these organizations grow and expand, they are confronted with a formidable obstacle: access to capital. Smallholder family farmers generally lack their own investment capital. And although microfinance has become increasingly widespread, it typically offers small loans to individual farmers.

Generally, long-term loans or capital to set up or develop enterprises for collective marketing, processing or trading are not accessible for organized smallholder family farmers. Well-organized banking institutions are often lacking in the South or they consider the risks of the investment too big.

The reasons for this are pretty obvious: from a purely commercial perspective, investing in such businesses involves high transaction costs and is quite risky – also because of all the adversities that can arise in the developing world.

A gap exists therefore between small individual loans on the one hand and industrial loans on the other hand. This gap of investment capital between, roughly spoken, 50,000 and 1 million euros is called the ‘missing middle in agricultural finance’ (source: Oxfam International).

A SOCIAL IMPACT CAPITAL FUND

Kampani is designed to help overcome this obstacle for entrepreneurial small-scale farming.  It would be set up like a commercial growth capital fund, yet adapted to the particularities of producer organizations in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, and focusing on social and development impact instead of financial gain for the investor.

Kampani is innovative in several ways:

• Kampani has raised capital from a consortium of the King Baudouin Foundation, private individuals, the Belgian farmers’ association, social investors, and NGOs.  It is precisely this combination that offers the greatest guarantee for success.  NGOs would be shareholders alongside private investors.
• The know-how, network, and expertise of the private sector would be combined with that of the participating NGOs.  It would in the first place the NGOs and social investors via their extensive network on the ground would generate the fund’s deal flow.  Furthermore, the private investors would bring the discipline of the market, and ensure proper and qualitative due diligence, risk management, and business acumen.
• Kampani can provide a subordinated loan, equity (minority shareholder only), or a combination.  Kampani will participate actively in the governance of the organization.  The representative of Kampani on the Board of the investee contributes his/her expertise and experience to the investment project.  In other words, Kampani’s added value extends beyond the financing only.
• Kampani’s investments will be combined, when appropriate, with continued capacity building, training, and other forms of support.  Typically, the NGO that first identified the investment opportunity will remain involved as a provider of TA.  Since the NGO is a shareholder or mission-aligned partner of Kampani, it has an immediate interest in the success of the investment and consequently of the producer organization itself.  To be clear, Kampani not itself be a provider of technical assistance: neither to the producer organization itself nor to its business.
• The close cooperation with shareholder Alterfin (a Belgian social investor providing working capital such as harvest financing) and a small number of other like-minded social lenders allow us to jointly address different financing needs at once.
• Kampani takes a long-term (5-10 years) and flexible approach to investments, so that producer organizations can develop their business at a rhythm adapted to themselves and their environments, and together with Kampani, the most adequate moment is determined for divesting the investments to the producer organization itself or to local financiers.
• Kampani’s impact will be measured through a combination of financial and socio-economic development indicators.
• Kampani pioneers a new instrument to promote economic growth, improve social indicators in the area around the investment opportunity and help safeguard the planet.  Kampani’s backers’ hope and ambition is to create a more effective and cost-efficient tool to do so compared to the more traditional aid business model.  Kampani’s shareholders accept the high risk and high transaction costs inherent in this business model.

NEITHER A TRADITIONAL CHARITY NOR A TRADITIONAL BUSINESS

The essence of Kampani is to use capital investment and its methods and procedures to achieve the socio-economic development of small-scale farmers, their families, and their communities.  For investors in Kampani, this development impact is their primary return on investment.  In this respect, as a means of achieving sustainable development, Kampani is to be placed somewhere between charitable grants on the one extreme, and mainstream business on the other, and is part of a whole family of instruments that seek to combine a business approach to development and are known as “ impact investment” – see the diagram below (source: EVPA).