Member, Jamie Kyles presented the Tanzania Coffee Project (GG#2094287) worth $100,000 USD
Jamie has been working on projects in Africa for 12 years and has several things going in Tanzania. This project is one of them and is based on a previous project in another area.
The project administrator is the Kolping Society of Tanzania - a lay ministry of the Catholic Church, in cooperation with the Bukoka Kagera-Uhuru Rotary Club.
Jamie has presented the project all over Zoom and has several clubs on board and is still looking for another $10,000 to make our budget. On July 1st, the funding formula for international projects changed with Rotary International and luckily this project is under the old rules.
The Kolping Society runs a school, with donations largely from Europe and it is a quality operation. Jamie showed some pictures of women walking kilometers for water every day and pictures of people making Conyagi or 'fire water'.
The project not only teaches farmers ways to improve their yields and profits from their coffee crops, they also teach coping skills, cooperative skills and social obligation so they can work together to take advantage of learning from each other and collaborating together as a community. For example, the women are taught to keep the accounts and they bank money to buy manure to mulch which adds nutrients to greatly increase their yield. It also increases the water retention, so lessens the amount of water required. The coffee they raise is Robusta Coffee and the husks are used in the manure compost.
As they make more money from their coffee crops, they have more money to pay for food for their families.