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Many women across the island of Idjwi collect coffee beans to sell for a small amount of money.  The problem is that most people will not buy the unhusked coffee beans, or pay very little for them if they are not husked.  Husking the beans is difficult without a coffee husking machine.  It is done by smashing one bean at a time between two rocks.  A machine is too expensive for the village women to purchase on their own in order to start their coffee ventures.

The coffee micro-loan plan is yet another attempt to foster a women’s small enterprise.  This project will pay for a coffee husking machine for the women in the local villages so they can harvest the coffee beans, husk them, and than sell the unroasted beans to coffee manufacturers in Goma or Rwanda.  In one village (as seen below) we watched a family husking the coffee beans with a locally made machine.  The children keep pouring water in the machine, the father is turning the handle and the mother is straining them.  The husks fall out the back and are collected to be used as fertilizer while the beans come out the front on the metal shoots into a strainer.

This is an excellent opportunity for the women since coffee trees grow across the island so little effort needs to be put into the planting and cultivation process. The natural raw resources are already there. The bottleneck to local village coffee operations is the cost of the initial investment in a coffee husker. PROLASA’s microfinance programme is supporting the investment into locally made coffee huskers as seen below, in order to also support local machine manufacturing industry.

If you would like to contribute to the women’s coffee initiative please see our Contributions page.