Nucafe is doing well at the moment. Currently, the union has 198 member associations, with over 200.000 coffee farming families. It is the biggest coffee organisation in Uganda and they have a professional looking website: www.nucafe.org.
The last two years Nucafe organised a National Coffee festival, which attracted around 5,000 participants, that include coffee farmers, university students, policy makers, exporters, coffee shop business leaders, financial institutions, agricultural entities, corporate companies, etc. The big advantage of this is that everyone is in one place at the one time and can meet and talk to each other. Last year the topic was ‘Skilling the youth’.
David tells us that this is an important topic in Uganda because many young people leave the farm and the family and go to the city. Nucafe is trying to make ‘staying on the farm’ more attractive.
In 2015 Nucafe built a new factory, where they roast their own coffee. The factory will be officially opened later this year. The market for the roasted coffee is mainly local in Uganda as it is tough to export this coffee. It is too expensive as air cargo. On the other hand green coffee is exported in containers to Italy, Germany and South Korea.
David Muwonge is in The Netherlands because he is one of the speakers on the Conference ‘Geodata for Inclusive Finance and Food’, organised in Rotterdam. He will talk about the fact that NUCAFE is offering their members a service which includes them in an insurance scheme and he will explain their approach for this programme, and how Geodata is used in this process.
Another reason why David is here is to meet and visit potential buyers. At the moment he has already contact with one company in The Netherlands, but he hopes there are more Dutch companies who will buy the farmers coffee.
