Betty Ndugga from Luwero District in central Uganda started a coffee nursery in her village out of the necessity to restore her livelihood. Today, she uses her business to empower fellow women, help the farming community overcome coffee diseases and advance reforestation.

Luwero has long been a farming community with an estimated 85% of residents engaged in agriculture. For Betty, her early years in the countryside hold good memories. Her parents grew plenty of food crops and coffee which they sold to give her an education. After she finished school and later got married, she moved from Luwero to the capital city Kampala. There she began a young family and set up a clothing retail store, with promises of a great future ahead.

Unfortunately, Betty’s life took a hard left turn in 2013 when she tragically lost her husband. As a single mother, she fell on very hard times and decided to move back to her small farming community in Luwero to take over her parent’s lucrative coffee plantation which they willingly passed on to her. However, when she returned, she found that all her parent’s coffee had dried up and succumbed to Coffee Wilt Disease (CWD). 

Coffee Wilt Disease (CWD)

Betty has 7000 plants in her mother garden of seven different coffee varieties (KR1 – KR7.) At the beginning of her business, Betty used to give seedlings out to the farmers in her community for free. She did this because she wanted to advance reforestation – a cause she gladly took on as her new purpose in life.

Today Betty sells her seedlings to the UCDA and they distribute them to farmers. She is a role model for other women in her community whom she empowers by employing them to work in her nursery and mother garden. Female empowerment is another cause she is passionate about because she knows how hard it is to be a single mother/widow and raise children alone.

Morris and his wife Erize Mwashirindi have been growing Arabica coffee in Southern Tanzania for decades since Morris inherited his father’s land. Although Southern Tanzania experiences only one rainy season in the year, the rainfall can be quite heavy and prolonged. This causes several problems including soil erosion and the increased occurrence of fungal coffee diseases such as Coffee Berry Disease (CBD) and Coffee Leaf Rust (CLR). To add insult to injury, over the years, the couple’s coffee trees have significantly aged and are yielding fewer cherries. These challenges ultimately reduced the couple’s coffee yields and their family’s main source of income.

As an alternative to the old, low-yielding varieties that are susceptible to major coffee diseases such as CBD and CLR, HRNS distributed improved seedlings to c&c project participants. These improved seedlings are hybrids of varieties that are resistant to disease and varieties that are high-yielding. They are created through an ancient technique called grafting. Hereby tissues of two different plants are joint. They keep growing together, combining the properties of both “parent” plants. Like this, issues like disease susceptibility and low-yielding can be overcome. So far, HRNS has supplied over 30,000 new seedlings of the disease-resistant compact varieties to c&c project participants in Tanzania.

Morris and Erize were extremely impressed by the yields of their improved varieties. Their harvest more than tripled when they expanded their coffee plantation by adding another 1.5 acres of improved varieties. Every season, they used to harvest about 400 kg of coffee from their 1.5 acres of old coffee plants but now they harvest about 1,250 kg of coffee from both their old and new trees. This exponential increase prompted Morris and Erize to begin a business of selling improved coffee seedlings to their community members.

Morris and Erize have begun a coffee nursery of improved varieties to sell to their community

Morris and Erize have come to terms with the fact that they need to either stump their old coffee plants or completely replace them with the improved varieties. Understandably, they were initially reluctant to do so because despite the many other crops they grow for both food and income, coffee is by far their most lucrative cash crop. With continued support from the c&c Tanzania team, they will continue to improve their farm management and also encourage other farmers to grow improved seedlings. c&c is advocating for and supporting the growth of shade trees alongside the improved seedlings. This agroforestry can contribute to reducing carbon dioxide in the air and as a result, mitigate climate change. It will also hopefully protect farmers against rises in temperature which are predicted to continue to put a strain on coffee production in the future.

Climate change is putting a strain on coffee production and the greatest impact is faced by smallholder farming families who depend on the lucrative cash crop for their livelihoods. Frankly, it is women, more than men, who are at the center of the struggle. This is not only because women do up to 90% of the agricultural work on farms, but also because women are disadvantaged by patriarchal norms and traditions that give them less access to opportunities and decision-making power than men. These disadvantages increase women’s vulnerability to climate change while reducing their ability to manage the impacts of climate change.

In East Africa, women are generally responsible for running households and working on farms. This entails walking long distances to collect firewood and fetch water. This significantly increases women’s workload leaving them with little time to attend training about climate-smart agricultural practices. Women are also typically excluded from planning and decision-making within their households because of the patriarchal nature of the family structure. This ultimately weakens the economic progress of women and limits the development of their families. 

These gender disparities make it clear that climate action must include the promotion of gender equality at the household and farmer organizational levels. Therefore, the initiative for coffee&climate (c&c) is integrating gender into its climate action in East Africa. Through our implementing partner Hanns R. Neumann Stiftung (HRNS), we are conducting gender training sessions in Tanzania and Uganda.

The gender training encourages men to share domestic and farm labor with women to increase the implementation of climate-smart practices at household level. Additionally, men are encouraged to include women in decision-making about household expenditure to increase investments in time-saving technologies so that women can attend training in climate-smart practices.

At the same time, equipping leaders of farmer organizations with the knowledge, skills, and tools about how to combat the gender disparities that affect their work with farmers leads to more female members building their resilience to climate change and accessing leadership positions in farmer organizations. As leaders of farmer organizations, women can advocate for more women-friendly policies to grow female membership and thus, strengthen the production, climate resilience, and overall activities of the farmer organizations e.g. marketing, loan facilities, accessing genuine agricultural inputs etc.

To enable women to attend climate adaptation training offered by HRNS, time-saving technologies are key. These include more efficient cooking stoves and domestic water harvesting tanks. The efficient cooking stoves save women time as the amount of firewood that they need to work is significantly less. This relatively cheap energy alternative to firewood is more beneficial because it decreases the rate of deforestation.

Domestic water harvesting tanks enable the storage of rainwater which saves women from having to walk long distances to fetch water daily. The time saved allows women more frequent participation in training on climate-smart practices. They can also follow their interests and diversify the household’s income which creates higher resistance of the farm to climatic impacts such as droughts or floods.

In Tanzania, a retired pastor, called Tukupasia Bugali and her husband are among many farmers who have accessed gender training from c&c. They were also given a water tank and a clean cooking stove through the project.

“The tank is extremely helpful to our household, and it makes irrigation easier. It has also enabled us to begin a coffee nursery of wilt-resistant coffee seedlings because irrigation is easier.” – Tukupasia Bugali 

Although women are more vulnerable to the impacts of climate change than men, on the contrary, they also have the power to effect change. If given the chance to attend training on climate-smart practices, women generally take up climate-smart farming practices better than their male counterparts. Additionally, when women are included in household decision-making, they can improve household expenditure increasing the likelihood of investments in time-saving technologies and climate-smart tools and technologies. If included in the leadership of farmer organizations, women can also positively influence and affect policies so that more women become members and participate in activities and training on climate-smart practices. For these reasons, c&c will continue to integrate gender into its climate change interventions in East Africa.