A Response to COVID-19 for Smallholder Coffee Producers: COVIR-20
COVID-19 has taken a toll on nearly every sector, and the coffee sector is no different, with negative impacts in every part of the value chain. Many cafes and roasters have let go of staff, struggling to stay afloat from online orders, or have closed their doors altogether. Major coffee events like the Global Coffee Expo and Re:co Symposium have been cancelled. Technical assistance and capacity building providers have swiftly postponed workshops at origin.
For cooperatives and smallholder producers, diminished demand is already resulting in not being able to close on contracts with buyers, or contracts being withdrawn or rolled-over. Contracts that are still being fulfilled face restrictions on mobility which may disrupt the logistics of transport and shipment. In many producing countries, farming families might be hindered from working or buying seeds and other essential inputs; families will struggle due to higher food prices, and producers’ children may rely on meals provided by schools that are no longer open (FAO). Coffee producers themselves, with the average age of coffee farmers in most countries reported at upwards of 50-years-old, are at high health risk.
Smallholder producers worldwide are rightfully panicked about whether they will be able to grow, harvest, and sell their coffee. Meanwhile, they are also unable to continue learning and adapting to the risks they already faced (climate change, price volatility, production and process risk, & others) before COVID-19, which also have a direct impact on their production and income. Bean Voyage, a social enterprise that provides training and market access to smallholder women, responded to this challenge by launching COVIR-20 — an initiative that creates virtual networks of smallholder women to show solidarity among producers, find new buyers and continue learning and growing as a community.
COVIR-20, which is short for colaboración virtual, launches in just 2 days, on April 1st. The virtual training support program uses low-cost, easy-access technology such as Whatsapp to connect five communities of smallholder women coffee producers. This 8-week pilot program will support over 60 smallholder women in Costa Rica. The two-hour weekly session is administered by Bean Voyage’s local country staff — Adriana Vásquez and Fernanda Carrillo — and the pilot will consist of two four-week modules: Post-harvest Practices and Financial Literacy & Planning.
I participated in a pre-pilot trial of the COVIR-20 program this past Friday, which focused on post-harvest practices. Utilizing resources such as Whatsapp meant skipping over barriers-of-access found in many typical online training platforms, such as the requirement of a high-speed internet connection and teaching new users how to navigate new technology. This meant that one of the other trial participants, who during the session was located in an area with a poor internet connection, was still able to participate.
Features like voice notes ensured the delivery of audio curriculum and allowed participants to contribute, hear each other’s voices, and feel connected. Information delivered through infographics was easy to download to my photo gallery and save for later — in a location that is nearly always accessible to me (my phone). An interactive activity near the end of the session tested what participants had learned, which built a sense of community among our group as we each jumped to answer correctly, and built confidence in our knowledge of the content. We all left with a short homework for the next session, and the Whatsapp group remained open so that producers can continue sharing information relevant to their communities and businesses.
I joined Bean Voyage’s Board of Directors over a year ago, and I have continuously been impressed with Sunghee Tark and Abhinav Khanal’s ability to mobilize their teams and respond quickly to challenges with tangible solutions. #COVIR20 is the next example of this shared capacity. While the dissipation of the COVID-19 pandemic still lacks a timeline, COVIR-20 will transform into a long-term solution for Bean Voyage’s farmers in a time of crisis.
To find out more about Bean Voyage and how you can support their work, visit www.beanvoyage.com. Follow the hashtag #COVIR20 on social media to follow new updates from the COVIR-20 program.
Other COVID-19 coffee resources:
- You can read more about the COVIR-20 initiative in this featured article from One Young World.
- To read about the COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on food and agriculture, visit the FAO website.
- For resources and programs being shared by the specialty coffee community that may be of assistance to vulnerable value chain actors (community support initiatives, government economic support measures, insights, online knowledge-sharing events) — check out the SCA Community-Contributed Resource Database. The database can be filtered by the value chain actor or region that may be in need.
Written by Andrea Zinn
Andrea Zinn is on the Board of Directors of Bean Voyage. She has dedicated her professional career to improving the livelihood of smallholder farmers around the globe. Through her work, Andrea has catalyzed $19 million in social agri-investments to support smallholder farmers in sustainably sourced value chains and worked on transformative projects training coffee farmer cooperatives to combat price volatility by protecting their livelihoods with complex hedging tools (derivatives, options, futures) on the New York Stock Exchange. Andrea currently works as an independent consultant focused on interventions that support coffee value chain actors to catalyze sustainability and social impact to improve livelihoods and incomes of smallholder farmers. She has previously worked with several development organizations including impact investor Oikocredit International as well as Catholic Relief Services.
Andrea is a 2014 Fulbright Scholar to Malaysia and a graduate of Villanova University School of Business. She was recently named to the AgGrad 30 under 30 list for 2020.
We are a feminist social enterprise that collaborates with smallholder womxn coffee producers so that they are able to lead their communities towards a sustainable future.
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