A dedicated micro credit fund for rural Madagascar

An important strategy of our microcredit framework is: Avoid spending your hard-earned money in the first place, if you can grow it yourself.

It has now been quite a few years since Jean our master gardener in Fiarenana approached us with the idea of growing (more) coffee (again). As a tireless innovator, he had already planted coffee in the past, before Zahana got to work with Fairenana, and knew from experience that it would grow well in his climate. At the beginning we hired him for the short-term project: growing coffee seedlings for his village. Since then a lot has changed, and Jean is now a crucial, indispensable part of the Zahana's staff in his village.

Sipping a cup of coffee as we write this report, we know all too well how important coffee can be for many of us… The same is true for rural Madagascar.

At the latest site visit earlier this year, Jean proudly showed us his new coffee plants that are indeed doing extremely well, next to the corn (or maize in the UK). As you can see from the picture, these coffee cherries have grown enough to bear fruit and are ready to be harvested soon. The ripe coffee cherry, if hand-picked dark red, makes for the best coffee. Since they don’t all ripen at the same time, this is a labor-intensive, picked one-by-one, process. Once again, our master gardener Jean is leading by example.

The irony is not lost on us that Jean will soon be drinking single source, hand-picked, sun dried, freshly (hand) roasted coffee...

Markus and Ihanta