Sewing the seeds of change

At Taylors we know that sourcing outstanding coffee starts with great relationships. Our single origin Ugandan coffee, ​‘Ingana’, is testament to this. Crafted with our coffee producer partners in the beautiful Sipi Falls region of Uganda, every sip bursts with citrus, caramel and tropical fruit flavour notes.

As well as working together to produce fantastic quality coffee, we’re also combining our efforts to help the local coffee growing communities thrive.

Simple tools like sewing machines can make a real difference to women’s lives in rural Uganda. They can use them to make and repair their families’ clothes and craft new items to sell at local markets. That’s why every pack of our single origin Ugandan coffee is supporting a project to give women opportunities to improve their livelihoods and create a brighter future for themselves and their families through providing access to sewing machines, practical tailoring skills and training in business and finance.

Our Sipi Women Economic Empowerment Project (or SWEEP for short) has been set up in partnership with Kawacom, our supplier in Uganda, to provide local female coffee farmers the opportunity to improve their livelihoods by helping them gain access to training in basic financial and business management skills coupled with practical training in tailoring.

Many of the women involved in the project have come from particularly challenging backgrounds – they may have been widowed or divorced, be raising children alone on very little income or due to unplanned or unwanted pregnancies and marriages, had to drop out of formal education at an early age.

As well as being a useful day to day skill, tailoring can not only reduce household costs otherwise spent on buying clothes or school uniforms for children, it can also provide a potential source of additional income which will go directly to the women involved.

In addition to the practical tailoring skills, women taking part in SWEEP have received financial literacy and entrepreneurship training that aims to help them set up and make use of community saving schemes. These schemes can help give women access to micro-loans – something that traditional financial systems are often unable to provide to rural communities.

Women can then use these small loans to buy their own sewing machine or set up their own local businesses. On top of this, women participating in the programme benefit from having a social network they can call on for support.#

Not only are livelihoods and incomes improving for the women involved, but their communities are benefitting from new businesses being set up, participants sharing knowledge with friends and neighbours and an increased community awareness on gender, rights and responsibilities.