How Meridah Nandudu is Brewing Women’s Empowerment in Uganda

(4 Minutes Read)

Meridah Nandudu, the founder of Bayaaya Speciality Coffee, built a growing coffee chain by working on a simple formula that women brought to her for sale can fetch a premium price slightly higher than men.

Naturally, one may puzzle over how women’s empowerment and coffee beans are connected. Yet, an almost illiterate Ugandan woman who never had a flourishing childhood in rural Uganda proved that women’s empowerment can be achieved by ferreting out novel ideas and concepts.

 Meridah Nandudu, the founder of Bayaaya Speciality Coffee, built a growing coffee chain by working on a simple formula that women brought to her for sale can fetch a premium price slightly higher than men. That forced conservative men, mostly husbands, to send their spouses or other female members of the family to sell coffee beans at the selling point. There unveils the story of a coffee neighbourhood in Uganda.

Nandudu grew up in Sironko district, a remote village near the Kenya border, where coffee is the community’s lifeblood. As a child, when she was not at school, she helped her mother and other women look after acres of coffee plants, weeding and labouring with the pulping, fermenting, washing and drying the coffee.

More and more men who typically made the deliveries allowed their wives to go instead. Nandudu’s business group now includes more than 600 women, up from dozens in 2022. That’s about 75% of her Bayaaya Speciality Coffee’s pool of registered farmers in this mountainous area of eastern Uganda that produces prized arabica beans and sells to exporters.

Nandudu’s goal is to bring more and more women into the coffee value chain. According to the US Department of Agriculture, Uganda is the second highest coffee producer in Africa, after Ethiopia.

The East African country exported more than 6 million bags of coffee between September 2023 and August 2024, accounting for USD 1.3 billion in earnings, according to the Uganda Coffee Development Authority. The earnings have been rising as production has been dwindling in Brazil, which is the world’s top coffee producer, due to unfavourable drought conditions.

The harvest season was known to coincide with a surge in cases of domestic violence, as couples fought over how much of the earnings men brought home from sales, and how much they didn’t. When coffee beans were sold by women to fetch more, men started sending their wives for sale.

So, when the women sell the coffee, she has a hand in it; she knows how much we have sold this coffee, and when they come back home, they can sit and discuss. That prompted Nandudu to launch a company that would prioritise the needs of coffee-producing women in the country’s conservative society. She thought of her project as a kind of sisterhood and chose “Bayaaya”, which translates as brotherhood or sisterhood in the Lumasaba language, for her company’s name.

It launched in 2018, operating like others that buy coffee directly from farmers and process it for export. But Bayaaya is unique in Mbale, the largest city in eastern Uganda, for focusing on women and for initiatives such as a cooperative saving society that members can contribute to and borrow from. For smallholder Ugandan farmers in remote areas, a small movement in the price of a kilogram of coffee is a major event. The decision to sell to one or another middleman often hinges on small price differences.

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A decade ago, the price of coffee bought by a middleman from a Ugandan farmer was roughly 8,000 Uganda shillings, or just over USD 2 at today’s exchange rate. Now the price is roughly USD5. Nandudu adds an extra 200 shillings to the price of every kilogram she buys from a woman. It’s enough of an incentive for more women to join the company. Another benefit is a small bonus payment during the off-season from February to August.