Endiro Coffee

For the 2019 World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, Absa has collaborated with Endiro Coffee, one of the premier coffee brands in Uganda and a client of the bank.

Visitors to Absa’s pop-up venue in Davos will be fortunate enough to sample some of our client’s fine products.

Endiro in Luganda means “a place where friends and family gather for a conversation and a meal” – and that’s exactly what the founders envisioned when they opened a coffee shop serving ethically grown coffee from Eastern Uganda’s Mount Elgon range in 2011.

Underpinning this vision of connection is a strong commitment to doing good and partnering with local communities, businesses and coffee farmers to improve the quality of farmers’ lives and the coffee they produce, as well as to help overcome social challenges such as child vulnerability.

This noble philosophy has seen Endiro enjoy spectacular growth, with the company now made up of five branches in Uganda, as well as a coffee shop and roastery in Chicago in the USA. Endiro has become widely known as one of the premier coffee brands in Uganda, serving high quality, single village-lotted and ethically-sourced Ugandan coffees.

Since 2014, the business has focused intensively on reinventing the way it engages in the coffee business at all levels and across the value chain so that its business footprint is positive.
This is also why the profits of Endiro are dedicated to projects that help and support vulnerable children – the company started its “Brewing a Better World” initiative to create brighter futures for these children in Uganda and beyond.

Endiro believes in building the capabilities and skills of the communities that it operates in and, as part of this, started the Endiro Growers initiative in 2015 in the coffee growing regions of Bududa and Manafwa in Eastern Uganda.

The initiative was started to directly source coffee for Endiro’s shops from farmers and to develop meaningful and transformational relationships with them. Spending more time directly mentoring and training farmers, listening to them and understanding their needs, and providing them with fair pricing has had a marked improvement of the quality of life for the farmers but also in the quality of coffee produced.

To date, more than 2000 coffee farmers have been trained and approximately 300 are actively producing specialty grade coffee for Endiro. Endiro Growers also assists where it can when accidents happen, and in 2018 started the Bukalasi Landslide Relief fund to raise money for families affected by the landslide in Bukalasi. There were 12 members of the extended Endiro Coffee family who were killed in the disaster, with dozens of others from the community also killed and hundreds displaced.

The company’s solid commitment to tangibly impacting and improving the lives of its employees, as well as the farmer families that it sources its coffee from, and vulnerable children and communities remain the cornerstone of how Endiro does business and will continue to do business as the brand grows and expands its footprint.

Did you know?

• Coffee is Uganda’s top-earning export crop.
  
• Uganda is currently the 8th largest coffee producer in the world.
  
• There are two main types of coffee: Robusta and Arabica. Uganda is one of the world’s biggest Robusta producers.
  
• Robusta is native to Uganda and two types are grown namely the ‘Nganda’ and ‘Erecta’.
  
• The variety of wild Robusta coffee grows in Uganda’s rain forests and is thought to be one of the rarest examples of naturally occurring coffee trees anywhere in the world.
  
• Nearly 60 percent of Uganda’s annual export revenue between 1996 and 2000 came from coffee.
  
• Approximately 20 percent of Ugandans make a living off coffee.
  
• Uganda’s coffee industry was state-owned until 1991.
  

*Information sourced from the Uganda Coffee Federation.