Gatagua Farmers' Cooperative Society

The story

The Gatagua Farmers' Cooperative Society operates in the Murang'a region of Kenya, serving a community of approximately 845 to 1000 smallholder farmers. The cooperative functions as a central processing hub where members, who typically cultivate coffee on plots smaller than one hectare, deliver their harvested cherries for collective processing.

Challenges

The cooperative faces the inherent volatility of Kenyan coffee production, which is frequently impacted by shifting climate conditions and socio-economic factors that influence annual yields.

Innovations

The cooperative maintains a strict focus on quality control, operating under the guiding principle that superior quality directly determines the price received by farmers, which has helped them achieve high cup scores.