Coffee Transforming Lives

Image supplied by Trade Aid

This is Adunya. He is nine years old and he attends his local primary school at Negele Gorbitu in the Yirgacheffe region of Southern Ethiopia. He is able to do so thanks to Fair Trade coffee and New Zealand’s Trade Aid organisation. In 2008 Trade Aid imported around nine shipping containers of coffee from the Oromia Coffee Farmers’ Co-operative Union – the organisation that Adunya’s coffee-farming parents sell their coffee to. The social premiums from those purchases alone will be enough to fund the construction of a new five-classroom school, which will provide more than 600 pupils like Adunya with an education. Without Fair Trade and buyers like Trade Aid, Adunya’s school would not exist. Fair Trade purchases also fund medical centres, drinking water and better roading in rural Ethiopia. www.fairtrade.net www.tradeaid.org.nz