Making coffee growers more resilient (PUR CAFE)

In Ethiopia, coffee production provides livelihoods for almost 15 million people. Highly susceptible to climate change, and particularly to drought, the industry suffers from unsustainable production conditions leading to erosion, land slippage and reduced soil fertility. Since 2015, PUR Projet, supported by private funding partners, has been involved in restoring degraded ecosystems through agroforestry in the Sidama coffee-growing region. Today, about 500,000 trees have been planted, supported by over 5,000 of the growers’ families. PUR Projet also provides training for these families in best agricultural practices. 

To ensure long-term sustainability of actions undertaken over the course of the project, the FFEM is supporting PUR Projet in developing its exit strategy. The goal is to improve the living conditions of the local growers through diversifying, enhancing and securing their income, for example through bee-keeping.

The project has four components:

• Supporting the development of activities that complement agroforestry and structuring biodiversity-derived value chains.
• Measuring the project’s impacts and communicating them to the beneficiary communities to reinforce buy-in and enhance on-going activities.
• Ensure long-term buy-in for all the local project stakeholders through raising awareness among young people and by promoting women’s empowerment.
• Defining and implementing an exit strategy for the project. This component is achieved through co-developing this strategy with the beneficiaries, exploring new product value chains and identifying or creating a local structure to take responsibility for the project and its outcomes in the long term.

• Improving the living conditions of growers and local communities.
• Women's empowerment
• Regenerating and preserving degraded ecosystems on the Sidama agricultural plateau
• Strengthening cooperatives and empowerment in responsible and sustainable development
• Enhancing the resilience of coffee cultivation faced with climate change
• Enhancing returns from coffee growing
• Improving the resilience of growers faced with coffee price fluctuations
• Securing the supply chains for quality coffee in the long-term

This project has benefited from the Climate Change Innovation Facility (FISP-climat), the dedicated private sector funding tool. It brings together ecosystem restoration and socio-economic development thanks to innovative agroforestry techniques and the identification and structuring of value chains of biodiversity-derived products.

It’s innovative also because of its public-private mechanism: the FFEM is supporting an existing project funded by the private sector, but does not cover long-term actions. 

Its awareness-raising puts growers’ families at the heart of the region’s sustainable development, with particular emphasis on women’s empowerment.