TAIZ, June 28 – At the first crack of dawn, young and old women from the Misrakh district of Taiz, Yemen, start off on their daily journey to pick ripe, beautifully red coffee cherries. They then carry the cherries back to the village in bamboo baskets, singing as they walk.
On the roof, they carefully, almost religiously, spread the cherries to allow them to absorb the warm morning sun, while they attend to the demands of the day.
These women are part of a community-based organization called Talook. The organization was established as a charity in 2001 in order to build the capacity of local women for varied forms of employment and to help them improve their economic conditions.
Through investing in coffee farms, which were present in the area but neglected for the past few years due to water problems, Talook hopes to accomplish this goal.
“Most of the other villages have abandoned the coffee plantation and are now growing other cash crops that don’t need much water or work. We are still loyal to this beautiful tree and are working hard through this organization to provide local farmers with the tools and techniques they need for better quality coffee,” said Fatima, a young woman of 20 who heads the Talook organization.
Local women take pride in their coffee. Girls as young as ten years old put in effort to improve the quality of the coffee produced from Misrakh district. Girls and women carry water jerry cans on their heads and on donkeys and fetch water from the neighboring spring in order to water the coffee trees.
“The women are the main laborers working in the coffee farms, as most of the men have migrated to urban areas, leaving the farms to the women,” said Mirvat Haidar, Senior Officer at the Small and Medium Scale Enterprises Support (SMEPS) agency affiliated with the Yemeni Social Fund for Development. Among its other projects, SMEPS works to empower the farmers, retailers and traders of the coffee industry in Yemen.
SMEPS also sponsored representatives of Talook to showcase their coffee at the Biofach exhibition in Germany last year. In addition, the agency has created networking channels for this women’s organization to reach local coffee traders and market their products.
In order to tell the world about Yemeni coffee and to provide local Yemeni farmers, such as those affiliated with the Talook organization, the chance to network with international coffee companies, SMEPS will be holding the second international conference on Arabica Naturals in December this year in Sana’a, the capital of Yemen.