Our Goal
For the Community
The goal of ROC is to transform Uganda’s coffee through a model that improves the quality of life for the coffee labor, smallholder farmers and supports healthy and thriving natural ecosystems. We focus on elevating the quality of Uganda’s coffee into the specialty coffee market and using margins generated from higher prices to invest in livelihoods of communities and conservation of the environment.
For community livelihood, ROC measures impact using the living income benchmark. We are assessing whether the workers on our farm and the farmers working with us are earning enough to live a decent life with a buffer for the unexpected instead of getting farmers just over the poverty line where smallholder households very often live and when the unexpected happens, the risk of falling into cyclical poverty is high.
We treat both our workers and the farmers working with us as business owners with incomes intrinsically linked to their household’s socio-economic livelihood system. On conserving the environment, ROC looks to regenerative agriculture as a solution that can help mitigate climate change, create more productive soil and support a more resilient food system. We emphasize building soil, minimizing inputs and enhancing biodiversity. Through our community outreach and demo farm, we encourage farmers to shift to a mindset of working with instead of against nature to support the health and productivity of their farms which provides them with the tools to plan for long-term success and mitigate future threats to their livelihoods.