Plantation of COFFEE
Most individuals have avoided visiting a coffee plantation during their trip to Queen Elizabeth national park. Between the game park and the agriculture areas of Queen Elizabeth national park, a coffee plantation is a stretch of large-scale cultivation. Technically, it resides in the buffer zone separating the park from the agricultural areas.
Own and administered by “Omwani Women’s Cooperative,” the coffee plantation within Queen Elizabeth National Park is a women’s endeavor. Through the manufacturing of organic coffee beans, Omwani women’s cooperative is a group of women dedicated to raising the quality of life for their family. The coffee is grown organically free of any synthetic pesticides or fertilizers.
Together with Robersta coffee plants, the coffee estate has around 1500 Arabic coffee trees. The omwani women farmers tend these organically. This also means that the ground there is rich enough to enable this very natural and conventional agricultural approach.
During your vacation in Queen Elizabeth National Park, stop by the cooperative coffee producing enterprise run by the omwani women. At the shared coffee processing plant, you can see hands handling the coffee beans. The opportunity to taste the best organic coffee bean products from this farm will also delight you. Applying this to all Uganda coffees, you might overlook the flavor of Starbucks coffee when you sample the coffee beans packed by omwani women cooperative in Queen Elizabeth national park.
Since their survival depends on this coffee plantation, the omwani women have learnt all the stages of coffee production at the communal plant and carry out the coffee making with all the love. The aroma of the coffee beans being roasted and ready for packing and shipment will permeate the coffee producing factory. From harvesting, sorting, drying, cleaning, secondary sorting, roasting to the last stage of packaging, all the steps of preparing the coffee ready are done manually.
Globally throughout the year, the cooperative of omwani women can generate and export a continuous supply of Arabic and Robasta coffee beans. This is so because Uganda gets two annual rain fall peaks. The cool equatorial climate added to the rains provides the coffee with the ideal conditions for growth.
The region’s climatic condition results in slow ripening of the coffee for the greatest quality coffee beans. These African women who are dedicated to provide the world with a unique taste of Uganda via the coffee grown by these small scale farmers do also show great love in the production process.
Women have to have a compelling cause for dragging their efforts toward something decent like this plantation.
The women developed their coffee-producing project to provide members with a reliable income stream. Although most of the local women have low education levels insufficient to find employment within the lodges in Queen Elizabeth national park, the area is not particularly industrialized to offer job possibilities to women in this area. For these impoverished native women, the concept of a coffee plantation folded up the suffering.
The coffee plantation was also developed to increase the women’s employability. Through their on-job training on how to process the coffee to the best aromatic coffee beans for export, all the ladies pick up a lot of skills.
Most of the women in this project have HIV and have been left behind by the men who conceived them; so, this project enables them not to feel like outcasts in the society. At work, the team links the ladies together as a family to enhance their welfare.
Many of the women participating can afford to raise their children and also help their relatives since the plantation provides this means. These single mothers can afford meals and also transport their children to school from the meager pay they receive from the coffee manufacturing operation.
If you enjoy coffee, your schedule will be much enhanced by the special coffee plantation visit. Your visit to the coffee facility run by Omwani Women Cooperation will elevate your Ugandan coffee taste.
