Fair Trade Coffee Stories

Fair Trade Coffee
Trade Aid’s form of trade helps to enrich, empower and transform disadvantaged producers’ lives around the world through income generation that helps to restore dignity and self reliance. This helps them send and keep their children in school, provides adequate housing and access to health care. Our trading structure supports social change and gives women a voice, protects the environment and creates sustainable development that enables producers to invest in their futures. Trade Aid  gives producers hope for the future of them, their families, their communities and their countries.

You can help by purchasing Excelso's Fair Trade Coffee.

Adunya's Story from Ethiopia

This is Adunya. He is nine years old, and he attends his local primary school at Negele Gorbitu, in the Yirgacheffe region of southern Ethiopia. He likes school and speaks English pretty well.

Adunya’s parents are coffee farmers who sell their coffee to Trade Aid through their coffee co-operative, the Oromia Coffee Farmers’ Co-operative Union. In addition to the fair price paid directly to coffee farmers, Trade Aid also pays an additional social premium which is used by the co-operative to fund community projects of their own creation. In rural Ethiopia, where many children do not receive any schooling, construction of primary schools is a very important priority for coffee farmers and they are currently using their fair trade premiums to build schools for as many of their children as they can.

For Adunya, an education that will prepare him for a life other than coffee farming is now crucial - in a country where population growth is making land increasingly scarce for new generations to farm even if they wanted to, some level of education is more important than ever if he is to hope for a brighter future.

Thanks to fair trade, thousands of children like Adunya now receive the education they did not have access to before their families starting selling to buyers like Trade Aid. Without fair trade, Adunya’s school would not exist. Conventional coffee buyers are not interesting in ensuring that the people who grow their coffee can provide their children with schooling. Fair trade purchases fund not only schools but also medical centres, wells that will provide farmers with clean drinking water, and better roading for rural Ethiopia.

In 2008, Trade Aid plans to import nine shipping containers of coffee from the Oromia Coffee Farmers’ Co-operative Union. The social premiums from these purchases alone will be enough to fund the construction of a new five-classroom school which will provide more than 600 new pupils with an education, most of whom have never seen a classroom in their lives.

This is one of many examples of the positive impact Trade Aid’s fair trade has on coffee farming communities around the world. If we accept that coffee farmers deserve more than the $3 a day an average coffee family lives on, we all have the ability to make massive changes to their lives even through modest gestures such as buying fair trade coffee.
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