As many of you may be aware, six months ago we set up a coffee shop in Solihull. The purpose of the coffee enterprise is to serve high quality, ethically sourced coffee from the African continent and reinvest a proportion of our profits into our development work in Uganda. Bora Coffee Co. is a separate entity to The Zuri Project, but it is run with the same passion for collaborative development. Below is the blog I published earlier, outlining how The Zuri Project and Opportunity Africa made use of the first financial donation from Bora.
I hope you enjoy reading it, Ross.
It is with great pleasure and pride that I can share with you all the results of the first donation that we sent to Uganda last month, via our charity The Zuri Project Uganda. Working in collaboration with Opportunity Africa in the village of Kihembe, located in a coffee growing region in the southwestern district of Kanungu in Uganda, we have provided the funds for our partners to plant a coffee plantation at the first ever secondary school in the village.
The new vocational secondary school in Kihembe, a project that our charity has been involved with since its inception [you can read all about it here], is giving hundreds of children the opportunity to attend secondary school for the first time. In order to help the school achieve sustainability in the near future, our partners wanted to ensure that the school has the capacity to generate income independently. Therefore, amongst other ideas proposed at focus groups within the community, it was decided by our Ugandan partners that a coffee plantation would be a significant asset to the school and in 3-5 years time, would yield a significant amount of unrestricted funds that could be used to pay for teachers salaries, buy scholastic materials, textbooks and other essentials involved with running a school in Uganda.
Our initial donation has supported our partners to buy over 160 coffee seedlings that will be planted at the end of this week with the coming of the rains. We have also provided funding to cover the labour costs of project officers who will supervise the delivery of the project, as well as funds to pay for the expertise of agricultural officers to monitor the project and ensure that the coffee can be of the best possible quality. We’d like to thank all of our customers so far for helping us to deliver this project. We are truly passionate about our development work in Uganda, and we’re delighted that you are all now part of this journey with us.
And who knows, in the next three to five years, you might just be able to taste some of the Kihembe coffee that you’ve helped to plant!
Ross.