Kula uplifts rural women coffee farmers in Rwanda.
By offering the Kula Fellowship – a 12 month poverty graduation model designed to empower and equip coffee farming families to move out of extreme poverty.
The Fellowship provides:
Chantal graduated from the Kula Fellowship eager to take what she’d learned and implement new techniques in her coffee farm to improve the health of her land and increase her coffee yield. Over three years later, she and her husband have done just that – increasing their harvest from 300 kgs per season to 1,000 kg per season.
But her passion didn’t stop there. Although she didn’t win a business grant through the Kula Business Plan Competition, Chantal had plans to build a business anyway – using their increased coffee revenue to build their savings and eventually create a business selling bananas in the local market… which then progressed to her starting another business in beekeeping, adding honey to her growing list of marketable products!
Chantal is the picture of hope for Kula – turning one underproducing coffee business into three thriving and profitable revenue streams, empowering her and her husband to achieve their household vision of sending all three of their children to school. As we were leaving her home, Chantal told us, “Life is really good. We are trying!” We can’t wait to see what she tries next.
