Powering Needs, Empowering Lives
Uncharted Ground With SSIR
Some 800 million people globally – as many as a quarter of them in India – have no access to electricity. Far more suffer routine brownouts and power cuts. The result puts the rural poor, who are most impacted, at a severe disadvantage in every way: Health-care services are crippled, education is compromised, and entire communities are cut off from modern industrial and digital livelihoods. In short, a key determinant of social equity goes missing. Harish Hande, an energy engineer, started SELCO in 1995 to pioneer the delivery of decentralized solar power to India’s rural...
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Healing From Trauma
Uncharted Ground With SSIR
Glasswing International teaches Latin American communities to understand and recover from the impacts of trauma induced by chronic and acute violence.
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From Plow to Prosperity
Uncharted Ground With SSIR
Babban Gona provides the capital and means to move Nigeria’s poor farmers from a life of subsistence to economic security.
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A Fair Deal for Coffee Growers
Uncharted Ground With SSIR
Vega Coffee lifts up struggling coffee growers in Latin America by enabling them to roast, package, and ship their own beans directly to US customers—and reinvents the supply chain in the process. This episode covers Vega's story.
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The Business of Water
Uncharted Ground With SSIR
Jibu franchises make clean drinking water affordable for Africa’s booming urban populations and provide economic opportunity to a new generation of entrepreneurs. Hear from the father-and-son team, Randy and Galen Welsch, who started Jibu in 2012. The social enterprise is now a leading purveyor of bottled water in four countries and growing rapidly in three more.
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A Global Movement for Environmental Justice
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Namati provides legal knowledge to communities around the world to help them defend their land, environmental, and other civil rights against abuse by commercial and political aggressors.
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The Healing Force of Family
Uncharted Ground With SSIR
Even before the pandemic, India’s public hospitals struggled with overcrowding and stretched resources. Noora Health is helping by training family caregivers on simple medical skills to help patients recover at home. This is the second episode of a two-part series about raising the quality of health care in the developing world.
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The Videos Saving Lives in the Developing World
Uncharted Ground With SSIR
Global Health Media marries video technology with compassionate instruction to address a quality crisis in the delivery of frontline health care. This is the first episode of a two-part series about raising the quality of health care in the developing world.
info_outlineFor decades, smallholder farmers who produce the world’s supply of quality coffee in developing countries have barely earned enough to stay in business. Many have gone under. Millions of those still producing live in poverty and go hungry. Now climate change is threatening their livelihoods as well. The main problem is a supply chain stuffed with so many middlemen, each taking their cut, that only a fraction of the proceeds from pricey specialty-grade beans gets to the grower.
That was the picture in Nicaragua until Rob Terenzi, Noushin Ketabi, and Will DeLuca started Vega Coffee in 2013. On the face of it, their solution seemed simple: Enable the growers to process and ship roasted coffee directly to consumers in the US—thereby cutting out up to a dozen middlemen and retaining the earnings for themselves. It’s not that others hadn’t understood the problem before, but no one else had figured out how to solve it at scale. This episode follows Vega’s story, covering:
- Rob’s initial discovery of the coffee growers’ dilemma (0:36);
- the structural inequities of the global coffee trading system (4:37);
- why Fair Trade and other “certified” designations fail to pull growers out of poverty (6:46);
- Vega’s early challenges with roasting ovens (11:31) and transporting fresh beans to the US (13:08);
- tapping Nicaraguan growers’ skills (16:13) and prioritizing women to promote gender equity (18:22);
- growing the US customer base (22:05);
- expansion to Colombia through a partnership with Mercy Corps (26:35);
- and the promise of Vega’s model to rectify other broken supply chains of commodities around the world (28:52).
For the full transcript go to: https://ssir.org/podcasts/entry/a_fair_deal_for_coffee_growers