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Kampala, Uganda | THE INDEPENDENT | Mwanyi Terimba, the Buganda kingodom coffee development company that started buying coffee beans in May 2022, has so far purchased 200 tones which management says is a good start.
According to Charles Kironde, the CEO Mwanyi Terimba Limited, 200 metric tonnes of coffee bought from farmers is roughly 60-70% of the expected coffee in this season. So far, Mwanyi Terimba has spent UGX 1.5 billion on buying the coffee. He adds that the company expects to buy 100 more metric tonnes by the end of this coffee season.
The company buys fair average quality coffee known as Kase from farmers who bring it to the company’s warehouse in Namanve. The prices he says range between UGX 6700 and UGX 7000 per kilogram depending on the quality of the coffee and in line with the moving market prices.
Coffee brought by the farmers is subjected to quality checks including the moisture content. The coffee is then graded and sorted according to grain size because each bag of coffee must have a uniform size of beans.
The kingdom of Buganda directly sponsors the company to buy coffee through the kingdom’s budget.
The warehouse in Namanve is being hired from Nucafe as the kingdom plans to build its own warehouse when business gets rolling fully. The company has not yet started selling coffee outside the country but is selling locally to companies such as Nucafe, Olam, and Kyagalanyi.
Mwanyi Terimba also hires trucks from Nucafe to transport large quantities of coffee (10 tonnes or more) from farmers’ gardens.
The kingdom set up Mwanyi Terimba Limited in 2021, a company limited by shares to buy coffee from the farmers and to find a market for it externally. The company was also started to add value to coffee through processing it. This idea was hatched 5 years ago when the kingdom rolled out the Emwanyi Terimba initiative with a goal of promoting coffee growing in the kingdom and later on set up a company to buy the coffee from the farmers, completing the value chain of coffee as spearheaded by BUCADEF.
In 2016, Katikkiro Charles Peter Mayiga under the Kingdom of Buganda inaugurated a campaign dubbed “Emwanyi Terimba”. Mayiga engaged the Uganda Coffee Development Authority (UCDA) and formed a partnership to boost coffee growth in Buganda region.
The UCDA was to provide seedlings and partner with the kingdom’s Buganda Cultural and Development Foundation (BUCADEF) to provide technical knowledge on the new development while the kingdom was to ensure people embrace growing coffee again.
Katikkiro Mayiga revealed that people have embraced the campaign, and coffee growing has increased by 35%. He also revealed that Buganda region contributed 30% of the coffee exported from Uganda.
The company is to expand its operations to not only buy coffee from the 18 counties of Buganda but to also buy from the whole country.
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