Inclusive Coffee Value Chains
Coffee is the important crop for household income in the Kapchorwa District in Uganda. Specialty value chains for coffee have been extensively promoted as a way to improve farmer welfare through higher incomes, guaranteed purchases and provision of inputs and extension.
The Inclusive Coffee Value Chains project sought to understand the extent in which these speciality value chains are inclusive, to understand whether factors such as intrahousehold claims and gendered norms affect participation outcomes, and how social policy and value chain payment methods could help improve inclusion and welfare outcomes for smallholder coffee producers.
The research questions guiding the research include:
Can we design survey and statistical methods to better identify and measure inclusion outcomes for value chains within econometric impact evaluation studies?
In particular, how do gendered preferences for income and value chain attributes, intrahousehold claims, and self control influence patterns of coffee value chain participation in the Kapchorwa District of Uganda?
How may social policy and value chain payment methods improve coffee value chain inclusion and welfare outcomes from inclusion for smallholder coffee farmers?
The Inclusive Coffee Value Chains research builds on a wealth of research from the project Developing value chain innovation platforms to improve food security in east and southern Africa (VIP4FS). This project was a joint initiative with Makerere University, the University of Adelaide, funded by the Australian Centre of International Agricultural Research (ACIAR) and supported by the Kapchorwa and Districts Landcare Chapter (KADLACC).
Fieldwork from Inclusive Coffee Value Chains project was conducted in February 2024. I visited Kapchorwa over January and February 2024 to manage this fieldwork with the excellent field manager Julius Njoke. We engaged just over 200 coffee growing households using village stratified random sampling, seeking to capture the diversity of villages and growing conditions within the Kapchorwa District.
For each sampled households, both the household head and spouse (n=411) participated in a survey and choice experiments with local enumerators, privately from each other's spouse and other household members. Over a few sessions in the same day, each participant engaged in:
A discrete choice experiment of coffee value chain payment methods.
Ranking questions over a broader range of value chain attributes. This choice experiment resembles best-worst scaling methods, but with greater detail on pairwise preferences. Value chain attributes include prices, payment methods, input and credit support, ease of marketing, and voice.
Recall activities on previous harvest season marketing behaviour of the individual and their perceptions of behaviour of their spouse and other household members.
The survey design successfully captured the diversity of preferences between spouses in which we can understand how this heterogeneity is aggregated for hosuehold level marketing decisions. More generally, gendered and spatial diversity in these preferences allows us to understand the extent and diversity in which existing coffee value chains are contributing to welfare outcomes beyond just price premiums.
See here for the first working paper from this research, focussing on how we can better identify and measure inclusion outcomes for value chains within econometric impact evaluation studies.
The Inclusive Coffee Value Chains research was funded by a grant from the Centre of Agribusiness, University of New England. Supporting the project included Professor Derek Baker (University of New England), Daniel Gregg (University of Adelaide) and Prossy Ibusikalu (Makerere University). In the field I was fortunate to work with an excellent group of enumerators - Silas Mongusho, Vinscent Chelimo, Caleb Chepkurui, Hilda Chekwemboi, Scalet Chekwemboi, Eunice Chekwemoi and Kenneth Njoke. Ethics approvals for the project were obtained from the University of New England (Approval number HE23-095), Makerere University (Approval number MAKSSREC 10.2023.706) and registered with the Ugandan National Council for Science and Technology (Approval No SS2311ES).
