The Scottish Government’s International Development department have funded Challenges Worldwide to deliver capacity growth to eight coffee cooperatives and 5500 farmers in the Western and Southern regions of Rwanda. The capacity growth is through internal business capabilities, marketing for customer engagement, community engagement and climate justice.
A team of business trainers have been brought on board to Challenges Worldwide who will be responsible for delivering the output of developing internal business capabilities across all eight partner cooperatives. The business trainers; Liza, Jonas, Olive, and Emmy are all former ICS volunteers and team leaders. They have experience of CMI (Chartered Management Institute) and using tried and tested tools to analyse business diagnostics and aid in realising recommendations based on information. This approach is being taken accounting for the length of the project and the nature of working alongside multiple different cooperatives who each have a different starting capacity. Alongside the business trainers we are working with Twin, Enactus and the Scottish Fair Trade Forum to achieve the project deliverables.
The four-year project is still within the formation stage, with the business trainers and their Enactus counterparts, visiting the partner cooperatives over January and February to establish a baseline. The next phase will be to understand the current capabilities of the cooperatives, identify the ways in which the cooperatives want to grow and can be grown and then using established and widely recognised methodologies, including the Chartered Management Institute courses.
After a successful end to 2017 the team are looking forward to providing further impact in 2018.
