By Vision Reporter
Meridah Nandudu is this year’s third best farmer in Uganda. She has been awarded this afternoon during the Vision Group annual Best Farmers’ Awards held at the company’s head offices.
Nandudu, who hails from Bulambuli district, is the proprietor of Bayaaya specialty coffee, which brings the aroma of the Ugandan coffee originating from the Elgon mountains right to you cup as it helps women to fight poverty. Bayaaya is a Lumasaba word meaning ‘sisterhood’.
Nandudu explains that she chose the name for her farm as a reminder of her goal right from inception which was to empower women economically as many were suffering gender-based violence.
She explains that it was breaking her heart to see women becoming helpless when their husbands did not cater for their families with some were pushed to prostitution.
“While growing up I witnessed a lot of domestic violence and child marriages, which sparked the idea that if I could change the life of just one woman, I would have made a big difference,” she says.
After graduating from Makerere University with a bachelor’s degree in social sciences in 2015, she got a job as a coffee buying agent with Gumutindo Cooperative Society. Fortunately, she was deployed in her community and she created relationships with farmers, especially women.
Using these connections, she says, she established a coffee farm in 2018. She started with growing coffee on her parents’ land but now she has about 15 acres but in different areas and plots due to the mountainous landscape of the region.
She has since expanded to adding value to the crop and set up a company, which was registered in 2022.
Today, the company has registered 253 coffee out grower farmers, 215 of whom are women. The farmers who are based in Sironko district, eastern Uganda are divided into 10 groups.
Each group is trained in the best agronomic practices to ensure they produce quality coffee and how to manage their gardens as a business.
She explains that for easy management, she has setup collection centres where coffee from each farmer is collected and stored at her cost in three sub counties of Bumasifwa, Bugiboni and Buyobo.
It is later transported to the main store at Namakwekwe ward, Impumude cell in Mbale city which somehow reduces the cost of transportation as the lorry picks from one centre.
“The 2023 Decembers season, for example, we sold 195,600 tones of coffee,” she explains.
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This is the ninth year running that Vision Group, together with the Embassy of the Netherlands, KLM Airlines, dfcu Bank and Koudijs Animal Nutrition, are running the Best Farmers competition. The 2024 competition run from March to November, culminating in today’s awards ceremony.
LEAD PHOTO CAPTION: Meridah Nandudu (center) receiving her award from the Ambassador of the Netherlands to Uganda, Her Excellence Frederiek Quispel. Photo by Moses Nsubuga
