Coffee is the ultimate social drink—how many friendships, romances or even business partnerships have been sealed over a steaming cup of Joe? But have you ever wondered how many coffee farmers can afford to drink the stuff? The answer is very few... in Africa anyway.

Without a local market, African smallholder coffee farmers are often paid pennies per pound of coffee they sell: the coffee that ends up in your cup every morning. Some have to make ends meet and feed their families on just $20 a year—that's not enough to live on whichever continent you're on.

These farmers are kept poor by a supply chain that concentrates profit in the hands of roasters and retailers. To make matters worse, changing weather patterns means crop yields are sometimes a fifth what they were 50 years ago—many farmers are considerably worse off than their grandparents.

A Fairer Deal

Safi Coffee pays farmers at least fair-trade prices for their coffee, which will go a long way towards improving their incomes.

But what makes Safi Coffee really special is that the farmers are also stakeholders in the company. Because they own equity in the company, they will receive additional profits in the form of company dividends. The more coffee the farmers produce, the more Safi sells, and the better the farmers do.

This is an important difference to many fair-trade coffee companies, which tend to see farmers as suppliers, rather than partners.

Direct trade Coffee
 
Safi coffee is grown in the lush foothills of Mount Kenya—one of the world’s prime coffee growing areas. Only the very best coffee beans are hand-selected for use in Safi Coffee. Our coffee is grown to local organic standards and the beans are artisan roasted in the US to guarantee freshness.

Through Safi Coffee, Kenyan smallholder coffee farmers are able to market their crops directly to conscious consumers in the US, without the need for middlemen.

Safi Coffee partners with local Kenyan grassroots NGO Rural Development Connections, which provides farmers with essential tools, training and support for community projects. One of Rural Development Connections major goals is to help these farmers keep their children in school so that they can break the poverty cycle.

In October 2009, Bill Gates told the audience at the World Food Prize in Des Moines, Iowa "Helping the poorest smallholder farmers grow more crops and get them to market is the world's single most powerful lever to reduce hunger and poverty." We couldn’t agree more.