Abhinav Khanal

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

Khanal 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 make 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.