- Village Enterprise will support at least 40,500 people in Ethiopia’s Kaffa Zone to break the cycle of extreme poverty, empowering 8,100 households to launch 2,700 group businesses
- A randomized controlled trial (RCT) will evaluate income diversification as a potentially scalable model for improving living conditions for coffee farmers
Bonga, Ethiopia, March 25, 2026 – Village Enterprise, a nonprofit seeking to end extreme poverty in rural Africa through entrepreneurship, is partnering with HereWeGrow, a nonprofit dedicated to improving the lives of coffee farming families. HereWeGrow’s mission is to maximize the impact of funding to build resilient coffee farming communities and scale impactful solutions in the coffee sector.
Village Enterprise is launching HARVEST (Households Advancing Resilience, Value Chains, and Sustainable Transformation), a three-year project funded by HereWeGrow in Ethiopia’s Kaffa Zone, which will provide the critical resources, training and skills to families living in extreme poverty in coffee growing regions to help them improve their living conditions. Village Enterprise will deliver its proven poverty graduation program to five cohorts over a three-year period, training 8,100 entrepreneurs to launch 2,700 small businesses in areas such as livestock rearing, grain farming, and vegetable trade.
While many households in this region are critical to the global coffee value chain, a large number remain trapped in extreme poverty, in part because their livelihoods are tethered to the volatility of a single cash crop. HARVEST will support program participants to diversify their income, creating a sustainable pathway out of extreme poverty for their entire household—more than 40,500 people in total. By equipping participants with the skills, capital, and resources needed to start new businesses in alternative sectors, the program will provide a safety net to build resilience against coffee price fluctuations and climate shocks.
The impact of these investments in improving the living conditions of families living in coffee producing communities will be externally evaluated through a randomized controlled trial (RCT). The evidence will determine whether the HARVEST model is a viably scalable and sustainable model for households in coffee producing regions in Ethiopia and beyond.
Village Enterprise’s proven approach
Village Enterprise will implement its proven poverty graduation approach to equip participants living in extreme poverty to set up their own businesses and create sustainable income streams in sectors outside of the coffee supply chain. Working in groups of three, participants will receive a $300 seed capital grant, nine modules of business and financial literacy training, and 14 entrepreneurship coaching sessions over a one-year period.
The program also supports the entrepreneurs to establish business savings groups, providing households with a community of other entrepreneurs to promote savings and gain access to loans and additional capital for productive investment. In total, 270 business savings groups will be created.
A data-driven approach to resilience
HARVEST will also include a rigorous randomized controlled trial (RCT) led by Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA). This study will evaluate the impact of the poverty graduation model on household welfare, including how diversifying a household’s income affects their ability to reinvest in coffee production. This project serves as a real-world stress test for how the coffee industry can evolve to protect the people who make up an integral part of the supply chain.
The RCT will assess the impact of the poverty graduation model by analyzing how much participating households’ living conditions improve, spillover effects on the wider community, and the impact of income diversification—including whether greater financial resilience enables farmers to reinvest in coffee production. The evidence and learnings generated by the HARVEST RCT will provide insights to inform the potential of scaling the program in coffee-producing communities across the globe.
Model for supporting the regional coffee industry
While the Kaffa Zone is renowned for its coffee, smallholder farmers face significant challenges in building thriving livelihoods. Low yields, limited access to credit and markets, and fluctuating global prices keep incomes precarious—and improving coffee productivity requires long-term investment that many households cannot sustain without a stable financial foundation. Through HARVEST, Village Enterprise seeks to build that foundation, producing a scalable concept that can serve as a model for coffee-producing regions across Ethiopia, Uganda, and Kenya.
Feben Tamrat, Ethiopia Country Director at Village Enterprise said: “Launching HARVEST in the Kaffa Zone is a milestone for our work in Ethiopia, allowing us to adapt our model to a new and evolving agricultural context. We are excited to empower 8,100 entrepreneurs to build thriving businesses and transform the future for their families.”
Lidia Mordel, Country Lead – Ethiopia at HereWeGrow said: “We are excited to support the introduction of a proven approach to coffee communities. Diversifying income is not a departure from coffee—it is an investment in it. Farmers who are financially resilient are far better placed to improve their yields and build thriving livelihoods.”
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About Village Enterprise
Village Enterprise’s mission is to end extreme poverty in rural Africa through entrepreneurship, innovation, and collective action. We work with vulnerable women, refugees, and youth who are most impacted by climate change, conflict, and displacement, and equip them with skills and resources to launch climate-smart businesses, build savings, and put themselves and their families onto a sustainable path out of extreme poverty. Village Enterprise has started over 118,000 businesses and positively transformed the lives of over 2.3 million people in Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, Uganda, Congo-Brazzaville, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Madagascar, Mozambique, Nigeria, and Tanzania.
About HereWeGrow
HereWeGrow is a non-profit funding organization based in Hamburg, Germany, dedicated to improving the lives of coffee farming families—with evidence-backed interventions. Working with partners in Ethiopia and Uganda, HereWeGrow funds and collaborates with like-minded organizations to improve the incomes of smallholder farmers and their families. To date, HereWeGrow has directly supported over 128,000 coffee smallholder farmers across Ethiopia and Uganda through its partners. Committed to finding, testing, and scaling what works, HereWeGrow measures success through household income and cost-effectiveness—using Social Return on Investment (SROI) to ensure that every euro invested generates the highest possible impact for farmers. Lessons learned are actively shared with the wider coffee sector to grow impact beyond the scope of its own work.