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Final Report: Bukalasi Landslide Relief

On 11 October 2018 heavy rains and reported seismic activity caused mudslides in the Bududa district of eastern Uganda resulting in the deaths of dozens of people, destruction of homes, crops and livestock.  Among the dead were twelve members of our Endiro Coffee farming family in the village of Bukalasi.  We first received reports of the devastation the same day and began sharing what information we could confirm through our social media channels.

In the midst of this crisis, we asked you to pray and you did. We asked you to donate certain items to help families in need, and you said yes.  We asked you to donate money to the relief efforts, and you responded with tremendous generosity.

Now that the crisis has passed and life in Bukalasi is slowly returning to normal, we wanted to take a moment to thank you and briefly update you on the results of your support.  

#WeAreBududa Partnership

For those of you based in Uganda, we asked that you help by providing direct donations of needed items to help families who had lost their possessions in the mudslide.  Coordinating this effort were our friends at the #WeAreBududa campaign.  Our other friends at the Uganda Cricket Association and Ultimate Cycling Uganda also stepped up to provide donations and logistical support.  

We collected your donations at all our Endiro Coffee locations in Uganda until 14 November and then loaded up Ultimate Cycling’s truck, delivering all the donated goods to Bukalasi on 15 November.  Our friends at the local Red Cross station received the items and distributed them to the families in need.  Many families were helped by your generosity of household items, food, and clothing. We even made sure a few footballs made it up the mountain.  

Fundraising Campaign - $10,000

Within 48 hours of the mudslide, our Head of Coffee, Milly Drijaru, was in Bukalasi meeting with farmers and getting a sense of their needs. The mudslide destroyed crops, roads and infrastructure, causing tremendous panic in the hearts of the farmers who have been able to escape extreme poverty through their partnership with us these past few years.  They told us clearly that their biggest concern was to get the coffee harvest in. They were afraid that a year’s worth of coffee might be lost and that they would once again find themselves struggling to survive.  

In response, we quickly created a plan and budget that would give the farmers the equipment, logistics and labor boost necessary to get the harvest back on track.  Our $10,000 budget included money for new fermentation buckets, coffee cherry pulping machines, coffee drying beds, solar powered security lighting for our primary collection site, hiring of trucks and drivers to move coffee from the mountains to the collection site, and day labor for cherry picking (especially for 8 women farmers whose husbands had died in the mudslide).  

Once we began to communicate this budget, you responded immediately, and the $10,000 goal was met in just a few hours.  It was an overwhelming response which allowed us to purchase and deliver the needed equipment within the week.  The farmers have since put your generosity to work and are seeing the first fruits of this year’s harvest receiving their highest quality scores ever.  

Going Forward

Endiro Growers farming families are expected to produce 50 tons (MTs) of coffee this season which will eventually make its way to an Endiro Coffee café or roastery somewhere in the world. Later in 2019, we expect to open our first full-scale production roastery and green coffee warehouse. Once open, the Chicago area (USA) facility will be our base for wholesale coffee supply serving all North America. Already, coffee roasting friends like Moto Roasters, Modest Coffee and Fresh Ground have begun roasting and selling these Bukalasi beans to their respective clients and much more is on the way.  

We are immensely grateful for your prayers and support. Because of you, a year’s harvest was saved and with it the progress we have been making together with the farming families of Bududa to end child vulnerability.  In the years to come, we expect the impact of this project to broaden significantly as our growing capacity to sell coffee enables us to bring more and more farming families into the Endiro Growers community.  

Also in 2019 we expect our first cacao harvest which will see some product experiments reach our shelves by early in 2020.  “Endiro Chocolate” will mean an entire new community in Uganda getting an opportunity to move from barely surviving to greatly thriving. This goes along with similar projects in honey, goats and chickens which, though you haven’t heard much about them, are changing lives every day.  

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Bukalasi Landslide Relief

Thank you for your prayers, encouragement and attention during these past days as we have been reeling from the devastating landslides in Bukalasi, Bududa district (Uganda) which have caused tremendous destruction and claimed many lives.  As we have already reported, the Endiro family lost 12 souls in the disaster as all of the Ugandan coffee you enjoy at Endiro is grown in the district.  We continue to grieve the deaths of our friends even as we plan a way forward.

As of today, 18 October 2018, we have received complete reports from our lead farmers and our Head of Coffee and are launching immediate relief efforts to support those affected.  We are grateful for the work of the Ugandan government and various NGOs who have quickly mobilized to support the people of Bududa.  We seek to compliment these great efforts with our own response.  For our part, we have called upon our friends at the Ugandan Cricket Association and Ultimate Cycling Uganda and have joined forces with the leaders of the #WeAreBududa social media movement to collect much needed goods such as blankets, food, and tools at our various Ugandan cafes.  That effort is well underway and will be a tremendous help to those in need (See below to contribute).

As for those of you who are our friends and customers in the United States or elsewhere outside of Uganda, we are focusing on responding to the needs which are foremost in the minds of our coffee farming families.  This crisis has resulted in a significant delay in coffee harvesting and the concern now is that crops may be lost (and with them much needed income for our farmers) if we are not able to move quickly and efficiently.  We are listening to our farmers who are asking that any fundraising we do on their behalf be focused on helping them to bring in their best coffee harvest ever.  There is great wisdom in this because ultimately it is the harvest which has helped so many in Bukalasi begin to escape the shackles of extreme poverty and it will be the harvest which most helps them to recover and rebuild in the wake of this tragedy.  

With that in mind, we have set a fundraising goal of $10,000 (U.S. Dollars) which we wish to raise as quickly as possible.  Half of this amount will be used to purchase equipment for the farmers such as coffee pulpers, coffee drying beds, coffee flotation buckets, solar panels and more. The other half will be used to offset the cost of hiring casual laborers who will help to bring in the harvest quickly. Even before finishing this statement, I am grateful to say that $525.00 has come in which leaves us with only $9,475 to raise.

How can you give?

1. If you are in Uganda, bring items listed in the graphic below to our Ugandan cafe locations in Kololo (Kisimenti near Acacia Mall), Muyenga (in Tank Hill Park), and Mbale (on Republic Street). 

2.      Come by Endiro Coffee in downtown Aurora, Illinois (29 W New York Street) during our regular hours to make a donation of any amount in cash or by check. Donations will be received by our US-based 501c3 partner, Borderless, and will be fully tax deductible.   

3.      Donate any amount with a credit card online at http://giving.weareborderless.com/bukalasi-landslide-relief.html.  This too will be fully tax deductible.  

Again, we are trying to move as quickly as possible on this, so I encourage you to give today.  We will be continuing to release reports on the deployment of goods and funds as we go, so please stay tuned to our social media channels on Twitter (@endirocoffee), Facebook (@endirocoffee and @endiroaurora) and Instagram (@endirocoffee) for the latest updates as well as here on our website/blog.  Thank you for standing with us and for brewing all the good you can.

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Brewing all the Good We Can: 2018 Endiro Growers Farm Report

We are pleased to report that Endiro Growers Uganda has now completed our third year of growing coffee in Eastern Uganda.  Recently we conducted a field survey of our ongoing coffee growing project in the village of Bukalasi (Bududa District, Uganda) to gauge our progress.  The results, testimonies and newfound hope for the future are simply breathtaking.  We are humbled to be a part of this profound work that is changing so many lives in such dramatic ways and we are extremely grateful for everyone from the farmer to the coffee drinker who with every bean and every cup is making the Endiro vision become a reality. 

As a reminder, our vision is to be a company that partners with others to end child vulnerability globally through coffee and its people, related products, profits, services, spaces and stories.

Exponential Growth of Coffee Production and Income Generation

In last year’s report, we cited a Lehigh University study that found that the average coffee farming family in the Bududa District of Uganda earns about $100 per year through their crops.  Since coffee has long been the primary cash crop for farmers living in this area, it is safe to assume that most families are thus living off between $50-200 per year or about 25-50 cents per day per household.  Keeping in mind that the World Bank has set the “international poverty line” at $1.90 per person per day, we recognize that poverty in Bududa is extreme.

We began growing coffee together with the farming families of Bukalasi in the 2015-16 season with three core principles:  

1) Ignoring global market prices, we would pay 8,000 UGX per kilo of coffee, without exception.  

2) We would train and equip the farmers so that they could perform initial processing (floating, pulping, washing, drying) so that we could achieve a specialty grade coffee.

3) We would do everything in the context of genuine relationship.

Since that beginning point, we have invested large amounts of money (which we don’t really have) and even larger amounts of time to train and equip our farmers.  Ultimately, we formed four teams in Bukalasi.  

·        Team A – Irene, Team Leader | 50 members

·        Team B – Beth, Team Leader | 50 members

·        Team C – Florence, Team Leader | 50 members

·        Team D – Aida, Team Leader | 50 members

As we have reported previously, the 2015-16 season saw a harvest of about 7,000 kilograms of parchment coffee produced in Bukalasi. The next year the volume doubled, allowing us to input over $32,000 into the community.

This year, at the beginning of the harvest season, we committed to increasing our price to 8,300 UGX per kilo of coffee.  The teams responded by producing more coffee in one season than in the previous two seasons combined – approximately 49,000 kilograms of coffee! This generated more than $110,000 for the community – money that is having an enormous and catalytic impact.

Bukalasi Life is Changing

The testimonies that we hear from Bukalasi coffee farmers are what keep us going.  Team Leader Irene reported that her farmers are buying more land, cows for milk, and bulls for meat.  She said that the children of the farmers in her team are in school and that domestic violence in the households is diminishing.  Aida, another team leader shared many of the same things and Beth spoke of how family life is improving and how new group savings plans have been instituted which are helping families during the off season.  Another farmer was able to use her money to build a rental house in a nearby city which is producing additional income for her family.  Many other farmers have made similar investments into auxiliary forms of income so that the coffee income is being multiplied – many families are quickly approaching and some have even surpassed the international poverty line.

In the next generation changes are quite pronounced. Now moving into our fourth year of coffee farming, we are celebrating with families who are able to pay for their older children to attend universities and trade schools.  One farmer has even reported that his daughter was accepted in a pre-medicine program at a university in Germany! Time will tell how the village of Bukalasi will be impacted by children who grow up healthy and educated.

Brewing all the Good We Can!

In addition to surveying the progress of the coffee farming projects, we spent considerable time with the team leaders workshopping, praying and dreaming about the future.  We have been inspired by the words of John Wesley:

“Do all the good you can, by all the means you can, in all the ways you can, in all the places you can, at all the times you can, to all the people you can, as long as ever you can.”

The powerful, almost desperate passion evident in Wesley’s voice here is how we feel all the time.  So much has been accomplished in Bukalasi and it would be tempting to sit back and rest in that for a while.  However, we still see so many challenges.  There is still so much poverty in Bukalasi.  So much need. So much brokenness.  And then there are many other villages in need.  We cannot be complacent.  

In the spirit of Wesley, we have adopted a new motto, “Brewing all the Good We Can!” What that means is that we are going to continue pressing forward in Bukalasi and elsewhere to do all the good we can in all the ways we can as long as we can.  Here are a few of our new projects at various stages of development:

 ·        Mattaya Coffee – We have officially started a new group in the nearby village of Manafwa.  Fifty farmers are there working with us and have produced just over 1,000 kilograms in their first season with us.  As some of you have tasted, the coffee is delicious and we hope to grow their capacity in the coming years.

 ·        “Drink the Whole Tree” – We are working with the Bukalasi farmers on developing products which make use of coffee cherries and coffee leaves in order to add additional income for our coffee farmers.  Some of you have tasted the first fruits of our coffee leaf teas and cascara drinks. There is more to come!

 ·        Goats from Mubende to Bukalasi – We have had the blessing of partnering with a goat project in Mubende, Uganda which has helped a number of refugee children get access to education, food and other basic needs.  Now the leader of that project is helping us to develop strategies for raising goats in other areas.

 ·        “Karamoja Honey” – We are partnering with some good friends among the Karamoja to develop a sustainable and scalable bee-keeping project.  Also, in 2018 we will be helping to sponsor “Tour of Karamoja”, an amazing mountain biking tour which will raise awareness and interest in the very needy Karamoja region. Could there be Karamoja coffee one day?

 ·        Iganga Chickens to Chocolate – We have reopened a coffee bar in Iganga and are continuing to work on some agricultural projects in a nearby village.  Recently we have developed a strategy together with a group of farmers to raise chickens, goats and then chocolate.  It sounds weird, but it’s happening.  Who doesn’t want to see Endiro Chocolate?

We really do thank God and thank all of you for helping us get this far.  As you can see, our dreams for the future are even bigger.  Please keep buying and drinking our coffee and telling others to do the same. We have some great new coffee roasting partners who are helping us to move more coffee and are helping to tell the amazing Bukalasi story.  We also have a number of awesome wholesale partners who are buying our coffee for their cafes, restaurants, and churches.  We are careful to give plenty of shout outs to these partners on our social media pages, so be sure to follow us on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook.  

[Want to buy wholesale green or roasted coffee? Click here and fill out the contact form.]

Soon we will begin building our first full-scale production roastery in the United States which will mean that you’ll be seeing more Endiro Coffee in more places.  We also will have our first origin tours coming up in 2019 – coffee nerds, get ready!

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📣ENDIRO IGANGA IS OPEN AGAIN ‼️📣 That’s right! We are thrilled to announce that Endiro is open again in #Iganga 🏝in a brand new location on Old Market Street! We are also so excited to be partnering with our friends at @musanacdo Musana Community Development with this relaunch. Find us now at Musana’s Sol View Restaurant & Bar. Our full #coffee, #juice, #smoothie, #tea and #milkshake menu is on now and you can pair it with breakfast, lunch or dinner selections from the Sol View menu. This lush, secluded oasis is the perfect rest stop for your 🚙 road trip. Come check us out now! #BrewingBetter #Uganda #coffeehouse #coffeeshop #cafe #coffeetime #roadtrip #EndiroIganga

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Wow... just got notified today that #EndiroAurora has won the highly coveted “People Love Us On Yelp” award for 2017 - not even a year into operations at our first USA location.  So grateful and humbled by the honor! Thank you to all of our wonderful customers who have given us both encouraging and constructive feedback. Even the occasional negative review has helped us to get better.  

And the biggest word of thanks has to go to our staff.  These young women and men came to us from so many different backgrounds and almost no restaurant/coffee industry experience.  But they have worked as a team to love and serve our customers and one another as well as to do their critical part in honoring the thousands of farmers who grow Endiro coffee. 

If you have not had a chance to leave us a review on Yelp, we’d love to hear from you there.  Check out our Yelp page here: https://www.yelp.com/biz/endiro-coffee-aurora 

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Endiro Growers Bukalasi Women’s Group is ready for harvest!

Check out our latest report on the Endiro Growers project in Uganda here: http://endirocoffee.tumblr.com/post/167465242504/i-am-not-poor-but-my-head-is-poor-a-2017-report 

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I Am Not Poor, But My Head Is Poor: A 2017 Report on Endiro Growers Bukalasi

There has been significant coffee news out of Uganda lately.  The Ugandan Coffee Development Authority reported that total exports for the 2016-17 season increased by 18% (https://www.independent.co.ug/ugandas-surging-coffee-exports/), boosting the nation to the top status among African coffee exporters.

Another announcement was recently made by the world’s largest furniture retailer, Ikea, who has entered into a multiyear agreement with Ugandan coffee giant Kawacom to put some 500,000 retail bags of coffee on the shelves of their stores around the world (https://dailycoffeenews.com/2017/10/24/ikea-to-begin-selling-coffee-as-part-of-multiyear-uganda-commitment/). 

Such stories were welcomed with excitement by coffee industry players in Uganda, but just how good is this news?

Unfortunately, it is too quickly assumed that increased exports of Ugandan coffee automatically mean good things for the farmers who grow it.  Global coffee trade, however, has long been a demand-side industry in which practically every bean has a buyer somewhere. The farmer who sold all of their coffee last year is not necessarily better off when they sell all of their beans again this year.  Selling out does not necessarily equal economic growth in business and thus cannot be thought to automatically signal positive transformation in the coffee village.

What does?

Transformation of the Coffee Village

Think about it.  A farmer, let’s call her Joyce, who sold 500 kilos of coffee cherries at 1000 Ugandan shillings (UGX) per kilo ($0.27 USD) in the 2013-14 season has made a total of 500,000 UGX or $138 USD.  If demand for Joyce’s coffee increases during the next year she can still only sell a maximum of 100% of her crop.  So, the only way her condition can improve is if she has the means to increase her crop volume or the price at which she sells it. Unfortunately, in Uganda, most farmers don’t have this kind of power.

When we at Endiro began to explore the farm side of coffee a few years ago, we discovered that even the “Fair Trade” farmers were not receiving either fair trade wages or any kind of community inputs which would help them to increase their volumes.  Instead farmers were facing annually decreasing crop yields and were being offered ever-decreasing prices for their coffee.

So, the reality was that a farmer like Joyce from our scenario above reached the 2014-15 season and found that she had only 300 kilos to sell and that the coffee buyers had decreased their buying price to 900 shillings per kilo. Joyce then earned only 270,000 UGX or $75 USD.  Her hope that coffee could ever improve her quality of life was quickly diminishing.

A recent report by Lehigh University’s Kelly Austin found that the average coffee farming family in Uganda’s coffee-rich Bududa district earns only about $100 USD per year from their crops. Austin goes on to cite increased illnesses, poor education access for children, and gender inequality as just a few side effects of this extreme poverty. (FULL REPORT)

Facilitating change is, at one level, quite simple. If coffee is going to become a source of hope and positive transformation, two things must happen.  First, farmers must get better prices for their coffee and, second, they must achieve better crop yields.

Bukalasi as we found it

Endiro has been dedicated to pursuing these two things since 2015.  We began our work in Bududa’s Bukalasi community with a group of women and men who had been exploited for many years.  These were farmers who were producing coffee that ultimately made it to the shelves of grocery stores in the USA and Europe in packages stamped with a “Fair Trade Certified” label.  Their reality however was far from fair.  The Bukalasi women were selling their ever-decreasing volumes of coffee to middlemen as cherries for 800-1500 UGX per kilo.  The middlemen then resold the coffee to cooperatives and brokers who then continued to move the coffee through several layers of trade on its way to Third Wave coffee joints and high-end grocery stores in the West. No money made it back to Bukalasi in the form of trainings, equipment, or community development projects.  The farmers were left to struggle alone against drought, pests, sickness and more. After  all, if they failed to produce, there was always another farmer somewhere else who had coffee to sell.

Endiro Growers Bukalasi Women’s Group

There is little question that we at Endiro had almost no idea what we were doing when we first began to partner with the ladies of Bukalasi.  We had never farmed coffee and had almost zero agricultural knowledge.  What we did have was a passionate and uncompromising commitment to a few key principles:

1) Ignoring global market prices, we would pay 8,000 UGX per kilo of coffee, without exception.  

2) We would train and equip the farmers so that they could perform initial processing (floating, pulping, washing, drying) so that we could achieve a specialty grade coffee.

3) We would do everything in the context of genuine relationship.

The farmers didn’t believe we were serious at first.  After all, no one was paying that much for coffee.  No one was paying anything close to that.  We were surely deceiving them.  So, at first, they protected themselves.  They used our equipment and continued to sell most of their coffee to the middlemen. When we came for the first portion of the harvest in 2015, we found only a little more than a ton of coffee.  But then the money started to be distributed and the farmers realized that we were for real.  We finished that season (2015-16) with just under 7,000 kilos of coffee.

Now, remember Joyce, our imagined farmer from above.  If she sold us her 300 kilos of coffee that year, she just made 2.4 million shillings ($650 USD). That’s significant.

During the offseason, we continued to coach, pray with and work alongside farmers to re-strategize their farming methods. By teaching them basics of harvesting, pruning, teamwork, how to create natural organic fertilizers and how to control pests through organic methods we saw that the farmers increased their yields for the 2016-17 season by over 100%.  We bought over 14,000 kilos from Bukalasi last season and the resulting quality has been judged by many to be Uganda’s best tasting coffee. In fact that Bukalasi coffee is now being enjoyed as far away as the USA, the UK, Taiwan, Thailand, Laos, and elsewhere.

Once again, we check in with Joyce, our representative farmer.  Now, her crop has increased from 300 kilos to 600.  Joyce now has an annual income on par with the Ugandan national average, something she had never dreamed possible.

During a recent visit to Bukalasi to launch the new season, we heard from all of the Bukalasi team leaders – farmers elected by their peers to represent teams of 50 farmers.  Their testimonies were breathtaking.  One woman said that it was the first time in her life that she had ever seen 1 million shillings.  She was immediately followed by another farmer who said it was her first time to see 2 million!  Several farmers reported that they used their money from last year to buy milk cows and that as a result their children were no longer suffering from malnourishment. Many farmers used their earnings to pay school fees for their children who were no longer missing class.  A young man reported with pride that he had begun nursing school thanks to the family’s coffee earnings.  One can only imagine the long-term impact that an educated younger generation will have on Bukalasi.  The reports continued for a long time.

For the 2017-18 season, the women of Bukalasi have set a goal of 50,000 kilos of coffee and so far they are well on pace.  Preliminary testing suggests that the coffee this year will be the best they’ve ever produced, approaching cupping scores in the high 80s.  Some of our farmers will produce 1000, 2000, 3000 kilos or more and find themselves quickly approaching the ranks of Uganda’s middle class.

For our part, we have stepped up our commitment to these farmers.  We will be paying 8,300 UGX per kilo this season in Bukalasi and investing in additional equipment, training and more. We are even working to develop coffee leaf tea and cascara (a beverage made from the dried fruit of coffee cherries) so as to bring two additional streams of revenue to the Endiro Growers Bukalasi Group.  

I am not poor, but my head is poor.

This is what we mean when we say we are “brewing better together.”  We mean partnering with the farming families, who must be fully participating agents in building their own future, to develop holistic strategies which genuinely bring transformation. The ladies of Bukalasi have a saying that they have adopted as a kind of motto for their forward success – “I am not poor, but my head is poor.” We believe that these women have much to teach a world of ultra-wealthy coffee conglomerates who cannot seem to afford to increase the amount of money they pay farmers. In fact, they have much to teach all of us.  How many of our supposed obstacles are little more than mental blocks?  Maybe we aren’t so poor, but our heads are poor.

We hope you coffee lovers out there will take a moment to consider the choices you make with each cup you drink. We hope you café owners will forget about brand names for a moment when you look for a coffee supplier.  We hope you micro-roasters will look beyond mere certifications and price tags when you order your next bag of green.  Get to know the real story.  And, if you are so inclined, join the Endiro story and brew better together with us (http://www.endirocoffee.com/better-coffee.html)! 

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Endiro Brings Global Vision and Ugandan Coffee to Aurora, Illinois (USA)

From day one, the idea was simple – start a small business and make a little bit of money to support organizations that help vulnerable children.  In Uganda, where some 200,000 children are living with HIV/AIDS and nearly 3 million are orphaned, the critical needs of the next generation are impossible to ignore and many individuals and groups are trying their best to brighten the future for young people.  Endiro Coffee was born in this spirit, as a tiny little café in the great big city of Kampala, Uganda, ready to do its part for kids.

What came next, however, was entirely unexpected.

Endiro quickly became popular among locals and tourists alike and the business found itself needing to grow to keep up with demand. The little café in Kampala expanded to fill the adjacent building and then began to launch new locations in other parts of the country.  In 2015, Endiro opened its 4th and 5th locations amid growing popularity and launched its first coffee growing project.

Today, Endiro has established itself as one of the most popular coffee brands in Uganda and has seen its operations expand from the coffee cup all the way to the coffee tree.  Currently, some 2,000 coffee farmers – most of whom women – are members of the Endiro Growers network and 100% of Endiro’s Ugandan coffee comes from these farmers who receive training, equipment, mentoring and the nation’s highest prices per kilogram of coffee through the partnership.

All this, of course, has allowed Endiro Coffee to do more than what they had ever imagined in partnership with others to end child vulnerability.  Said one Endiro leader:

“We are amazed at what has been accomplished, but we know we are still at the beginning, the things we see on the horizon in the next year – in Uganda and in other parts of the world – are going to take us to another level in terms of what we can do for the sake of vulnerable children.”

In a few short weeks, the Endiro story will start yet another chapter as the company opens its first location in the United States.  Just outside of the great American city of Chicago lies Aurora, Illinois. There on the banks of the Fox River, Endiro is getting ready to launch a coffee shop in the heart of the city’s historic downtown district.  Aurorans, Chicagoans and even diaspora Ugandans will soon be treated to single-origin Ugandan coffee from the village of Bukalasi, specialty grade Ugandan tea from Mityana, and even some Ugandan street food favorites such as “rolex”, samosas, and “muchomo”.  In true Endiro fashion, a full breakfast, lunch and dinner menu will compliment a coffee, tea and juice menu that will be difficult to find anywhere else.  Endiro’s Corporate Executive Chef explained:

“We call our culinary style, ‘Glocal Food’ because we like to take popular dishes from around the world and put our own, distinctly Ugandan twist on it. Aurora is going to love it!”

The Endiro Aurora location will also be a roastery, which means that all the coffee you drink there will be roasted right in house to ensure maximum freshness and flavor – and don’t worry, you will definitely be able to take a bag of your favorite beans home with you along with Endiro’s signature t-shirt which proclaims boldly, “With enough coffee, I can change the world!”

Indeed, that same Endiro vision will be coming to Aurora along with it’s famous coffee. Endiro’s leaders have already begun to network with local organizations that are working with children and young people in the area.  Endiro’s Managing Director commented:

“Child vulnerability is not a Ugandan problem.  It is not an African problem.  It is a human problem and wherever we find ourselves as a company we want to be intentionally engaging with others to ensure that every child has an opportunity to realize their God-given potential.”

In the end, Endiro is not simply a Ugandan restaurant chain launching out into the American marketplace. It is not just another in a long list of new wave coffee shops entering a crowded field.  Endiro is a company wholly built upon a love for children and entirely dedicated to doing whatever it can to “brew a better world” for them. It’s vision statement says it all:

“Our vision is to be a company that partners with others to end child vulnerability globally and to advance justice, peace, liberty and dignity through the utilization of coffee and its related products, profits, services and spaces.

[endirocoffee]

Endiro Brings Global Vision and Ugandan Coffee to Aurora, Illinois (USA)

From day one, the idea was simple -- start a small business and make a little bit of money to support organizations that help vulnerable children.  In Uganda, where some 200,000 children are living with HIV/AIDS and nearly 3 million are orphaned, the critical needs of the next generation are impossible to ignore and many individuals and groups are trying their best to brighten the future for young people.  Endiro Coffee was born in this spirit, as a tiny little café in the great big city of Kampala, Uganda, ready to do its part for kids.

What came next, however, was entirely unexpected.

Endiro quickly became popular among locals and tourists alike and the business found itself needing to grow to keep up with demand. The little café in Kampala expanded to fill the adjacent building and then began to launch new locations in other parts of the country.  In 2015, Endiro opened its 4th and 5th locations amid growing popularity and launched its first coffee growing project.

Today, Endiro has established itself as one of the most popular coffee brands in Uganda and has seen its operations expand from the coffee cup all the way to the coffee tree.  Currently, some 2,000 coffee farmers – most of whom women – are members of the Endiro Growers network and 100% of Endiro’s Ugandan coffee comes from these farmers who receive training, equipment, mentoring and the nation’s highest prices per kilogram of coffee through the partnership.

All this, of course, has allowed Endiro Coffee to do more than what they had ever imagined in partnership with others to end child vulnerability.  Said one Endiro leader:

“We are amazed at what has been accomplished, but we know we are still at the beginning, the things we see on the horizon in the next year – in Uganda and in other parts of the world – are going to take us to another level in terms of what we can do for the sake of vulnerable children.”

In a few short weeks, the Endiro story will start yet another chapter as the company opens its first location in the United States.  Just outside of the great American city of Chicago lies Aurora, Illinois. There on the banks of the Fox River, Endiro is getting ready to launch a coffee shop in the heart of the city’s historic downtown district.  Aurorans, Chicagoans and even diaspora Ugandans will soon be treated to single-origin Ugandan coffee from the village of Bukalasi, specialty grade Ugandan tea from Mityana, and even some Ugandan street food favorites such as “rolex”, samosas, and “muchomo”.  In true Endiro fashion, a full breakfast, lunch and dinner menu will compliment a coffee, tea and juice menu that will be difficult to find anywhere else.  Endiro’s Corporate Executive Chef explained:

“We call our culinary style, ‘Glocal Food’ because we like to take popular dishes from around the world and put our own, distinctly Ugandan twist on it. Aurora is going to love it!”

The Endiro Aurora location will also be a roastery, which means that all the coffee you drink there will be roasted right in house to ensure maximum freshness and flavor – and don’t worry, you will definitely be able to take a bag of your favorite beans home with you along with Endiro’s signature t-shirt which proclaims boldly, “With enough coffee, I can change the world!”

Indeed, that same Endiro vision will be coming to Aurora along with it’s famous coffee. Endiro’s leaders have already begun to network with local organizations that are working with children and young people in the area.  Endiro’s Managing Director commented:

“Child vulnerability is not a Ugandan problem.  It is not an African problem.  It is a human problem and wherever we find ourselves as a company we want to be intentionally engaging with others to ensure that every child has an opportunity to realize their God-given potential.”

In the end, Endiro is not simply a Ugandan restaurant chain launching out into the American marketplace. It is not just another in a long list of new wave coffee shops entering a crowded field.  Endiro is a company wholly built upon a love for children and entirely dedicated to doing whatever it can to “brew a better world” for them. It’s vision statement says it all:

“Our vision is to be a company that partners with others to end child vulnerability globally and to advance justice, peace, liberty and dignity through the utilization of coffee and its related products, profits, services and spaces.

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Bee 🐝 keeping and coffee ☕️ farming are a perfect match! These simple hives are scattered around the coffee plantations of our farmers in Bukalasi. It is a part of our long term strategy as beekeeping boosts the health and productivity of coffee trees 🌲 and provides and important secondary cash 💰 crop to our farmers who are continuing to journey from barely surviving to greatly thriving. In the next two years, we aim to install hundreds of new hives throughout our coffee origins in Uganda.

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LOOKING TO BREW A BETTER WORLD IN IGANGA!

We are thrilled to announce that Endiro is taking the next steps for a long and bright future in Iganga. Several things are in the works:

1. In partnership with local farmers and other partners, fields are planted for the growth of coffee and cacao along with other key crops. We want to see quality of life improving for the folks there and will have much more to say about this soon. What will Iganga coffee be like? Will we be enjoying Endiro Chocolate soon?

2. Endiro will launch its first guest house soon in Iganga and is in the process of finishing our beautiful new property for this purpose.  Out of the hustle of the city, visitors will enjoy a retreat style environment and will have opportunities to learn from local farmers and artisans.  

3. Endiro’s coffee shop in Iganga will temporarily close so that we can rebuild in an improved location nearer to the guest house. Building a new location from the ground up will allow us to create jobs for local workers and improve amenities for our customers.  Look for Endiro’s shop on the main road to close by the end of this month and stay tuned for construction updates on our new location.

We believe in a great destiny for Iganga and its people and our excited to plant even deeper roots in that wonderful place.

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We are thrilled to see that the Lonely Planet, one of the world’s most trusted travel guides, has released a list of their favorite coffee houses in Uganda. [CHECK OUT THE TOP NINE COFFEE SHOPS IN UGANDA HERE]

This really is a great list and we feel honored to be named among them. Definitely, we see that the coffee scene is really growing in Uganda -- that’s nothing but good news to our farmers who will see the market getting stronger and stronger as a result.  

Let us just say thank you to all of you out there that have helped us become one of the best coffee spots in the land.  We promise to keep striving to brew better and better for you, for our team, for our famers and really for the whole world. 

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Myanmar (also known as Burma) was ruled by a brutal military junta which violently oppressed and ultimately dispossessed minority ethnic groups like the Karen, the Chin and the Rohingya until recent years. Indefatigable democratizing forces saw victory in the form of a new constitution in 2011 and landmark elections in 2015 which resulted in the political party of Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi coming into power.

But the scars remain.

Generations of displaced peoples spent decades in refugee camps, some died there, some were born there. And now tens of thousands have been resettled to foreign lands. Many lost property. Nearly all lost loved ones. Fear and an abiding sense of hopelessness mark the minds of far too many.

Our Endiro family has had the opportunity to befriend many refugees from Burma for the past several years. We know them well and have exchanged many stories as we see much in common between the Ugandan and Burmese peoples.

Some of our friends have begun to venture back to the land of their mothers and fathers. They go to see if anything remains of houses and farms and relatives. They go with tears and something very similar to #hope.

And because they are our friends, we want to join them on this journey. As they embark on new rebuilding, restoration and reconciliation efforts, Endiro Coffee will, as usual, look to the cup, as a way to lend our support.

Recently in our brew lab, we roasted and cupped four coffees produced by farmers in Myanmar which have been able to attain specialty coffee grades due, in part, to the work of Atlas Coffee in that country. Two of those coffees are now on the way to our shops and are due to me online at Endiro soon.  

We have been learning from Atlas about the projects in Myanmar and are very encouraged by their efforts to really help these communities to develop through coffee.  Check out one of their recent reports here.

Now as we proceed to bring these coffees to market through our shops, we are in conversation with our friends from Burma in order to understand how coffee can best help their efforts to rebuild, reconcile, and restore their beloved nation. We will keep you posted on how these things develop. In the meantime, we hope you will enjoy a cup of some really delicious Burmese coffees and know that each one is helping to brew a better world!

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Just over a year ago, we began working alongside women and some men farmers in Bukalasi to improve the quality of the coffee they had been producing and to increase the value that they were receiving for their families and community through the sale of coffee.  We have reported much about this. 

Well, we are now overjoyed to report that the Bukalasi women have now gone to the district of Manafwa to train women their in how to do what they have been doing in terms of coffee production and leadership development. 15 new teams have formed in Manafwa and we expect to bring you single-origin Ugandan Manafwa coffee later this year. The ladies of Manafwa will join the Bukalasi women as the highest paid (per kilo parchment) coffee farmers in the country. We are so honored to be welcomed into the Manafwa community.  

Thank you for continuing to support the Endiro vision. With enough coffee, we will certainly change the world!

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At Endiro Coffee our vision is to be a company that partners with others to end child vulnerability globally by advancing justice, peace, liberty and dignity through the utilization of coffee and its related products, profits, services and spaces – breaking barriers and bringing holistic transformation from Uganda to the entire world.

'Our vision is to end child vulnerability globally through coffee"

What is “Child Vulnerability”? We affirm the document entitled “Who are the children at risk? A Missional Definition” which was published by the Lausanne Movement in 2015. We also recommend checking out the “UN Convention on the Rights of the Child - In Child Friendly Language” which is full of very critical points that help us to understand what it means for a child to be vulnerable. 

This is not just wishful thinking for us. This is our entire reason for existing as a company. We will make progress or we will close down. Everything we do as a company is in one way or another designed to serve this tangible goal. We are not satisfied by simply doing something good. We want to end something that is diabolically evil. 

We are deeply grateful for all of you who stand with us by choosing to eat our food, drink our coffee, work at our shops, share our story with your friends and online, and partner with us in various other ways to brew a better world! We know we cannot do this on our own.

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Our first season of coffee-growing has come to a successfull close. We began working with farmers in several regions and found the women farmers of Bukalasi to be the most eager and receptive to partnering with us. We were able to accomplish much together, including:

1. Farmers were organized into peer-mentoring groups and many women had their first experience of providing leadership to a group of their fellow farmers. The Bukalasi Women’s Group is well led and communicating best practices, praying and worshipping together and building a bright future for their next generation.

2. Farmers were trained and equipped to go from simply selling cherries to middlemen to processing their coffee to parchment and selling to Endiro at a premium price.

3. The Bukalasi farmers achieved their best ever coffee quality scores, consistently scoring in the mid-80s. By keeping this coffee in its microlot, we have been able to serve Bududa Bukalasi coffee as a single origin all year and have very often heard that Endiro is serving the best-tasting coffee in Uganda.

4. The Bukalasi group increased their volume of coffee harvested verses other years and every kilo of parchement sold through the Endiro program resulted in 8,000 UGX going directly to the farmers. Our farmers were among the highest paid (per kilo parchement) in the world. Many of these ladies had been recieving less than 1,000 UGX for a kilogram of coffee cherries before they joined our program.

5. The women of Bukalasi are preparing now to help us train new farming groups in other regions of Uganda and Endiro is preparing to bring their coffee to the larger market of the United States as we launch our first coffee shop their soon.

When you drink coffee at Endiro, you are drinking with confidence -- better coffee that is making the world a better place. 

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In case you haven’t heard, Endiro is expanding to our first international location later this year. We have chosen a century-old building in historic downtown Aurora, Illinois. That’s just outside of the great city of Chicago. Endiro Aurora will be a roastery cafe and will allow us to bring our direct sourced Ugandan coffee to the American market.  We expect that this will give us a much larger market for our farmer groups and thus make a broader and broader impact. 

If you have seen our tshirts, you know that we believe that more coffee can change the world. This is because, we pay a fixed, dependable price for every kilo of coffee that we buy from our farmers. Usually, this price runs anywhere from 3-10 times what they earn from middlemen, cooperatives or other coffee companies.  This is changing lives in Bukalasi where all our coffee has been coming from thus far. But now we are looking at farmer groups in other regions in Uganda and even in other nations. We are serious about this vision:

Our vision is to be a company that partners with others to end child vulnerability globally and to advance justice, peace, liberty, and dignity through the utilization of coffee and its related products, profits, services and spaces. In short, we are all about brewing a better world!