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    JusTea as­sist tea farm­ers in­crease earn­ings by 20 per­cent

    A Van­couver based NGO is help­ing Kenyan tea farm­ers in­crease their earn­ings by upto 20 per­cent by re­mov­ing mar­ket bot­tle­necks like the middle­men in tea pro­cessing. Cur­rently farm­ers earn about one per cent of the re­tail profit from the tea they grow.

    JusTea was foun­ded by Paul Bain, who gradu­ated from UBC with a polit­ical sci­ence de­gree last year, with the help of his father Grayson Bain. They foun­ded the or­gan­iz­a­tion after a visit to Kenya in 2012, where they lived with small-scale Kenyan tea farm­ers.

     “We want to bring justice to the tea in­dustry,” said Isaiah Muuo, the Kenyan part­ner of JusTea.
    They are cur­rently run­ning a 30-day fun­drais­ing cam­paign through the local com­pany Fun­dRazr. Their goal is to raise about Sh1.7 mil­lion  to pur­chase equip­ment for the two re­gions in which JusTea will be op­er­at­ing.

    With the money, they aim to bring in equip­ment to build the first pro­cessing kit­chens in the two re­gions and to edu­cate their Kenyan part­ners on how to pro­cess tea them­selves. Bain said they are bring­ing in a man from India with dec­ades of ex­per­i­ence in tra­di­tional hand pro­cessing meth­ods to do this. About half of these funds will go to pur­chas­ing the tea that people who con­trib­ute to the cam­paign will re­ceive.
    Bain said they chose the re­l­at­ively humble goal of a 20 per cent in­crease in salary in order to avoid hav­ing neg­at­ive at­ten­tion drawn to the farm­ers in­volved.

    “If all of a sud­den we double their salar­ies … it could al­most os­tra­cize them in the com­munity, so we’ve been work­ing really closely with our part­ners in Kenya to learn how to pay them more but not make it so it’s all of a sud­den,” Bain said. “Other people will be­come sus­pi­cious of what they’re doing. They might want to get in on it as well. We might not be able to have the re­sources to be able to take more farm­ers in at the time.”

    Muuo said re­cent changes in the Kenyan gov­ern­ment give JusTea the op­por­tun­ity to pur­chase tea dir­ectly from farm­ers rather than hav­ing to buy it from the gov­ern­ment, as was the case pre­vi­ously. He ex­pressed the frus­tra­tion farm­ers have felt with the gov­ern­ment-con­trolled sys­tem. “If I pro­duce the tea and I give it to an­other per­son to sell it for me, I have no con­trol over that, and so whatever [price] they give me, I ac­cept, be­cause there’s noth­ing I can do.”

    Muuo said even farm­ers who pro­duce a lot of tea need to buy a cow or goat to sup­ple­ment their earn­ings. He said JusTea should in­crease the stand­ard of liv­ing for those in­volved, al­low­ing them to buy food or be able to send their chil­dren to school.

    In the fu­ture, Bain hopes that, with the raise of profits and the in­creas­ing tea de­mand, JusTea will be able to in­stall more pro­cessing kit­chens in other re­gions in Kenya that wel­come this kind of pro­ject. For now, they have two co-ops in Kenya with a total of ten farm­ers.

    Bain said that the tea will be sold on­line, with prices com­par­able to that of David’s Tea and Teavana.

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