Best Farmers 2025: Kibinge Coffee Farmers’ Cooperative Society is Uganda's best Co-operative

VISION GROUP | HARVEST MONEY | BEST FARMERS | MASAKA

It all started with five coffee farmers determined to tackle their challenges together. They were dealing with low prices, making the enterprise unprofitable

This is the foundation in which Kibinge Coffee Farmers’ Cooperative Society was established in 1995. Today, the co-operative has over 2,000 members in Masaka and other districts with the head office at Misanvu village, Kibinge sub-county.

The co-operative has a structure that accommodates offices, coffee mills, roaster and trucks used transport raw coffee to the factory and processed coffee to the market.

Genesis

The main purpose of the cooperative was to get a high return on investment from coffee, explains Sowedi Sserwadda, the chairman for the cooperative.

“There was only one Asian buyer who paid sh100 for a kilogramme of wet coffee,” he recalls.

The buyer only wanted wet coffee. There were many farmers all vying for the Asian buyer and he could not take all the coffee, thus some of it developed moulds and it would be thrown away, causing the farmers to incur losses. In respone, they learnt how to dry their coffee and started selling dried berries called kiboko.

By the 2000s, Sserwadda says the group had grown into an association. By 2009, it was registered as a coffee farmers’ cooperative society which has 12 operation zones.

Each zone has 3-4 villages. Each zone has a large-scale farmer who is the nucleus farmer offering agronomic assistance to the other members through training, aggregating their dried coffee as well as supplying fertilisers and pesticides, among others.

“With assistance from the agronomic experts from the head office, we ensure our members apply the right practices in their gardens from digging the hole and picking the right planting material. It also includes fertiliser application to ensure high production and productivity,” he says.

In 2011, the cooperative started exporting coffee under the fair-trade system which is a global movement that aims to ensure that producers in developing countries receive a fair price for their products while also protecting the rights of workers and the environment. It focuses on creating more equitable and sustainable trade relationships especially for commodities like coffee, cocoa and bananas.

Sserwadda says they started with one container of 20 metric tonnes through another company because at the time they did not have the coffee export licence.

Fortunately, that same year, they were able to get a permit to export their coffee. Today, they export 30-40 containers depending on the season a year each weighing 20 metric tonnes with major markets in Netherlands, Belgium and Japan. Sserwadda explains that the cooperative has 2,407 members in Masaka and neighbouring districts like Sembabule and Lwengo.

This is the tenth year running that Vision Group, together with the Embassy of the Netherlands, KLM Airlines, dfcu Bank and Koudijs Animal Nutrition, are running the Best Farmers competition. The 2025 competition run from March to November, culminating in today’s awards ceremony.