Producing the best-quality coffee is a complicated business. When it comes to growing coffee, for example, farmers need to know how best to plant the coffee seedlings, how much to water them and how to harvest and process the beans.  Jennifer Poni, an agronomist with TechnoServe in Yei, South Sudan, ensures that the farmers she works with grow the best coffee they can. TechnoServe is a non-profit organisation working with Nespresso to produce, in this instance, its new Suluja ti South Sudan coffee.  “I sensitise and motivate the farmers,” says Poni. “My role has been to develop and train farmers in good practices. Now I coach the people who train them.”  It’s an unusual role for a woman in South Sudan. Born into a farming family in the Yei area of the country, Poni spent much of her childhood exiled in Uganda due to the civil war. Most women in that country didn’t have the chance to go to school in the 1970s, but when she was 14 the family returned to their farm and an NGO sponsored Poni’s education. Soon she began to work with farmers on nutrition in various parts of the country.  This work lasted for three years, until conflict intervened once more. Poni’s family returned to Uganda in 1990, where she was employed by the Red Cross to work with women. The family returned to Yei in 1997 after pro-government forces had recaptured the area, and Poni started work on a project producing sunflower seed oil.  So how did she get involved with TechnoServe and Nespresso? “At the end of the sunflower seed contract, I went home to manage my farm,” Poni says. “In 2012, I was at a meeting about coffee with other farmers when TechnoServe came to see us. The farmers elected me as a manager and, since I didn’t want to disappoint them, I accepted! So I started working for TechnoServe and then became manager of one of the wet mills, the construction of which was supported by Nespresso. TechnoServe then sent me to do surveying and other activities with the coffee farmers as part of Nespresso’s sustainable quality approach to coffee farming.”  The farmers from that area already knew about the quality and location of the coffee plants. TechnoServe and Nespresso were able to help them innovate, introduced wet mills for processing the coffee and drastically reduced the time it took to get the coffee to market. As a result, three coffee co-operatives were established, involving 500 farmers. But the resumption of the civil war made for particularly challenging times. “In 2014, when the second season’s coffee crop was almost ready, all the expats had to leave,” Poni says. “While senior TechnoServe staff were living in Ethiopia, Kenya and Uganda, and could offer support, I remained in the country to continue with the farmer co-operatives.”  This year has proved more stable, with senior staff returning and other staff in Yei being hired. Now Poni trains the trainers who work with the farmers. “I am supervising and coaching them to be good advisers. I accompany them, I check to make sure the lesson plan is right and that farmers have the right information. I follow up at least every week. I am also going to the local authorities to talk to them about the training.” Women in Yei have particularly welcomed this move. While women usually grow food for their families to eat, rather than cultivate cash crops, there are times of the year when they would have time to farm coffee. It’s a chance they are eagerly taking up.  “Women didn’t realise that coffee was a good cash crop because it was the men who were [farming it]. They were not very much involved [in the process] except for hulling and cleaning,” says Poni, who recently become involved with Women International, a partner organisation of TechnoServe that helps train women farmers. “The sponsors selected women who were given 150 seedlings to plant.” Some of them were already growing coffee and all were extremely enthusiastic about the possibilities that coffee provides. “They are already involved in the TechnoServe and Nespresso project, including those who haven’t even planted coffee yet.”  Poni can see how the coffee revival project has inspired local farmers and, in turn, the benefits that will accrue to local communities and South Sudan as a whole. Coffee – the first significant non-oil export from the country – has now been exported to France. “Those who abandoned their farms, or who are not planting coffee, can now see that there are good profits to be made,” Poni says. “That money will go back to their families and eventually develop their community. If it goes on, it will benefit the country too.”
A new coffee from Nespresso has provided a much-needed boost to South Sudan’s farmers and, says agronomist Jennifer Poni, given women a stake in the country’s economy