Benefit sharing is uneven in the specialty coffee industry with smallholder farmers and agri-SMEs—who perform the majority of the work and assume a disproportionately high amount of the risks—not sharing equally in the profits along the value chain. Smallholder farmers in particularly remote communities are distant from larger buyers and often left as price takers with little negotiation power. Valentina Duque, frustrated with this dynamic, founded the Siruma Coffee Company in 2017 to connect coffee-farming communities with specialty buyers in order to generate a positive social impact.
Due to the security situation in Colombia, coffee farmers in many regions of the country remain disconnected from the market—including the departments of Caldas, Cauca, and Tolima where Siruma operates. The lack of knowledge and training for farming and processing specialty coffee is evident in these coffee-growing communities. Siruma launched a unique joint venture with one of their buyers, Falcon Coffees, to overcome the challenges that buyers and exporters each face in navigating the process of getting coffee from rural farmers to overseas roasters. The result of this joint venture has been higherquality coffee and greater consistency in product as a result of a set of workshops and projects done with the growers. Partnerships where agri-SMEs and buyers have more equal power and decision-making ability are rare, but are necessary if we hope to overcome the challenges facing rural farmers and the whole supply chain.
In 2022, Root Capital provided Siruma with its first loan from a CSAF lender, a line of trade credit that enabled Siruma to increase their volume and fulfill progressively larger contracts. In 2023, Incofin extended an additional line of credit to the business, helping Siruma grow their sales 63% year-over-year. This is one of the many women-led businesses that Incofin lends to as part of their intentional investment in expanding their gender lens investing (GLI) approach. Working through CSAF’s partnership with Value for Women, Incofin built internal buy-in for GLI and expanded their own gender-inclusive practices. Learn more about the tailored engagement with three CSAF members, including Incofin, in the joint report: Closing the gender gap in agricultural investments.
Beyond business growth and farmer incomes, Siruma invests in promoting the environmental health of producers’ farms and the planet. In 2023 alone, Siruma installed 30 solar dryers to help coffee farmers adapt their coffee processing to increasingly unpredictable rains caused by climate change. Siruma also trained 800 farmers on good agricultural practices last year and financed carbon emission reduction in the region through the replacement of traditional cookstoves with more energy efficient alternatives. As the business has grown, Duque and her team are investing in the long-term productivity of local farmers and environmental sustainability of the region.