The Village

Currently, The Village comes from the Turihamwe IWCA, sweet and exceptionally clean coffee hailing from the Ngozi region of Burundi. Sourced through Jeanine Niyonzima-Aroian of JNP Coffee, this coffee was produced by a small group of founding members of the International Women's Coffee Alliance (IWCA) chapter in Burundi. At first sip, the coffee presents the honeyed, ripe, stone-fruit sweetness typical of excellent, clean coffees from East Africa. But the hard work of the women of Turihamwe is increasingly apparent as the cup cools: complex and delicate flavors such as melon, orange blossom, rosewater, and vanilla unfurl and lengthen in the aftertaste.

JNP Coffee's founder, Jeanine, didn't jump right into coffee—she originally started a nonprofit called Burundi Friends International, whose focus was on youth development and eradicating poverty. It was through this non-profit work that she met the president of the International Women's Coffee Alliance (IWCA) chapter in Burundi, and they began to collaborate. The IWCA was founded in 2003 by a group of women in Costa Rica, Nicaragua, and the US who decided to come together as a group to change the coffee industry for the better by focusing on female empowerment and connection. There is strong research to suggest that investing in women increases the sustainability of coffee everywhere. Women are proven to reinvest almost all of their income back into their families, their coffee business, and their communities. The work of the IWCA all over the globe fosters leadership, economic development, and sustainability for women and the industry as a whole.

The organized group of female producers in Burundi at the time they met Jeanine was small but still growing, and sought to bring together the female workforce—a group that makes up about 70% of all labor in coffee in the country. However, most female producers aren't landowners or in a position to contribute to their family's economic growth, like being able to open a bank account. Their first project with JNP wasn't, in fact, to import coffee, it was to provide female producers with goats. Diversification of income in this joint effort was profoundly successful, and it led to many future projects focused on economic empowerment and financial literacy—and, of course, trading coffee was interwoven through all of it.

Since their first meeting, the IWCA chapter in Burundi has grown by 20 times its original size and has begun to include men, both male partners of female members and others who are beginning to see the power of coming together as a group to prioritize gender equity. JNP sponsors this chapter and underwrites every purchase of a lot separated out to be women's coffees—this means JNP purchases, markets, and imports the coffee on behalf of this group of female producers no matter what washing station they work with.

Last year, JNP Coffee purchased and traded about 95% of all coffee produced by members of the IWCA chapter in Burundi. The province of Ngozi, Kayanza is very close to the border with Rwanda, and, like its neighboring countries, also shares a position in East Africa in the Great Rift Valley where it meets the African Great Lakes Region. The great majority of coffee producers in Burundi are smallholders. And, instead of talking about the area of land owned by a coffee grower, as is done in other producing countries (i.e. hectares), in Burundi a grower measures how many trees are owned. On average, producers own about 25-50 trees each, so it takes the harvest of many to make up a large enough lot to market.