Improving internal procedures as final steps in realizing a sustainable coffee business venture

Ankole Coffee Producers Co-operative Union Ltd (ACPCU) was founded in July 2006. It has 16 primary society members who between them have about 5,000 member-farmers. Its main business is Fairtrade and Organic-certified Robusta coffee, sold mainly in the European market to date, but with increasing interest from USA and the Middle East. It collects hulled, ungraded Robusta FAQ from member-societies, cleans and grades it and sells it on the local market or exports it in containers. In 2012-13 ACPCU has procured about 1,400 tons of Robusta FAQ, and exported around 50 containers as Fairtrade, with perhaps half of those being double-certified Fairtrade and Organic. The balance has been sold locally to exporters. ACPCU's mission is 'to promote the mutual economic interests of members in a sustainable way through value addition and bulk marketing in order to produce and export good quality products which are competitive on the market.' In order to involve its member societies and their farmers as much as possible in the value addition chain, ACPCU has used Fairtrade premiums in 2009 to buy a plot of land in the designated industrial area of the expanding town of Kabwohe, a location that is central to its area of operation. In 2012 ACPCU added to that plot and is became the outright owner of a rectangular parcel of land about 2.05 hectares in size. ACPCU intended to use the land as a complex containing new offices, warehouses, a coffee-processing factory and a nursery for coffee and shade-tree seedlings. In 2013 ACPCU managed to realize financing for the project and construction activities have started early 2014. It is expected that the coffee processing export facility will be ready and operational at the end of 2014. ACPCU has over recent years shown itself that it is able to market the members coffee at a good price on the export market. It continuously realized to expand the volumes of working capital and buyers and thereby seriously scaling up the coffee sales. With the coffee processing facility in place the union will be able to even further increase income and export volumes. In recent years ACPCU has managed to take big steps and successes in becoming a sustainable and viable business entity. However, with the factory almost ready and operating, ACPCU has indicated that there are still internal business procedures that need to be improved. Where the support of last year's Agriterra intervention were mainly focused on assisting ACPCU with the realization of its investment and marketing ambitions, the support in 2014 will mainly focus on a final set of activities to make sure that ACPCU will be able to manage and operate the new processing facility successful. Key focus areas are human resource management, financial management of the cooperative and primary societies, strategic business management, establishing key performance indicators and a dashboard, internal control and finally professionalizing the website.