Bean Voyage

Bean Voyage Image 1

Abhinav Khanal

Ambassador-led Initiative

1:5

SROI

Abhinav is the co-founder of Bean Voyage, a nonprofit social enterprise that provides training and market access to smallholder women coffee producers in Costa Rica.

Bean Voyage has worked with 112 women and more than 500 community members, with plans to impact more than 700 community members in the coming year.

Abhinav and his team support smallholder women coffee producers to turn their pre-commercial coffee cherries into commercial products, ready for the market. Typically smallholder women in Costa Rica sell coffee cherries to processors and end up with around 5% of the final coffee sale price. Bean Voyage works with smallholder coffee farmers, enabling them to process and package the coffee and sell it online so that they end up with a significantly greater share of the sale price. Abhinav and his team manage the sales and marketing side of the operation, so that the finished products can be sold at a fair price and the producers earn as much as 40% of the final revenue from coffee sales. The training that Bean Voyage runs focuses on the coffee journey from bean to cup, and has three main pillars of economic development, environmental protection and gender justice. The economic pillar consists of teaching farmers how to improve crop yields, increase coffee quality and making the final product globally competitive. The environmental pillar complements this training by ensuring growth methods minimise reliance on harmful fertilisers and use climate smart agriculture techniques. The gender justice pillar focuses on agency, enabling women to learn business and conflict resolution skills in a stable and supportive network. Bean Voyage also attempts to have conversations with men in the community to ensure that they are aware of the work the women are doing, and that they engage with them as allies.

Abhinav was selected to attend the 2016 Ottawa Summit as an Emma Watson Scholar. Bean Voyage has received support from partners of One Young World such as the Western Union and Firmenich, in the form of financial support and opportunities to present its work around the world.

In 2018, Bean Voyage won the grand prize in the Facebook Social Entrepreneurship Award of $55,000 worth of advertising credits, access to a Facebook marketing expert, and executive mentorship from Carolyn Everson, VP of Global Marketing Solutions at Facebook. The Award helped Bean Voyage to develop its online marketing strategy through advanced strategic advice as well as hands on training on how to maximize return on investment of digital advertising. This resulted in Bean Voyage reaching over a million potential customers, thus increasing sales, and enabling more services for more female farmers.

 

SDG 11 - Sustainable Cities and Communities