How to do good without 'doing' the good

Caring people often ask us: What should it look like to support social transformation in a place I can't fully understand and have no right to control?

In other words, how can development look like freedom, not colonisation, to the people impacted? We've settled on at least one fundamental rule: "We" shouldn't be doing the work on the ground, though we can support in more proportionate ways.

With this in mind, we've been using Skylark money to fund Bette Buna's social projects in Ethiopia without prescribing what a "social project" should look like. 

Our staff members Micah, Tabitha, and Will have contributed in ways that enable local people to direct the front-line work, and we've just seen some early results of how the community of Taferi Kela is coalescing around some big changes to their family incomes. 

Step 1: Listen

Local people conducted a survey of local people. A random 100 respondents described their incomes and greatest needs. Then, discussion groups allowed more listening in gatherings that were both homogenous (the same types of people) and diverse so that different perspectives could best be heard. These forums were structured as traditional Ethiopian coffee ceremonies, a socially embedded custom where all sorts of people sit at the same level in a safe space around the person making the coffee.

Step 2: Study

Here's what they found: 

  • In a place where the benchmark for a livable income is about 19,000 birr ($121 or £91) per month, the average household income during harvest season in Bette Buna’s village of Taferi Kela was 7,000 birr ($45 or £33) — and that's for an average family of nine.

  • Median incomes often triple during coffee harvest time, and 42% of people had no income at all outside harvest season.

Ethiopia is an agrarian society loaded with potential, with coffee representing the country's highest value export even as 70 percent of the people who produce it live below the poverty line. Therefore, improvements in agriculture can profoundly boost incomes and quality of life.

Step 3: Co-create

The improvements most impactful to the people of Taferi Kela involve growing and processing more high-value coffees, while also replenishing ecological capacity by growing crops within diverse ecosystems that generate additional benefits. The collaborative solutions to emerge reflect these values:

  • Bette Buna has developed new, climate-resistant coffee seedlings that also yield more coffee, and are giving them to local growers for free. That’s 350,000 new seedlings per year, each worth around $1.50 in extra annual income.

  • Those growers also get training in better farming and processing practices for better results.

  • Eucalyptus trees, which deplete the soil, are replaced with fertility boosters like beans and "false banana" trees, which also represent common food sources. Both of these are grown in a mix with coffee trees.

  • Bette Buna itself employs single mothers, parents of children with disabilities, and other disadvantaged people in their nursery while working delicately to reduce child labour without doing harm in a local context. 

The income from coffee seedlings will continue to accumulate every year, and we think this effort will generate $10 million (£7.5 million) per year in additional income for the 30,000 people involved within six years of the nursery opening.

That new income of $28 per person per month is both significant in percentage terms and … only a start. This is the scale of the need here: The increase will raise people from extreme poverty into “just poverty.”

Step 4: Generate income

Then it's time to sell that coffee. That's the biggest role for Skylark, and one of the most enabling things we can do: help access the market and vouch for Bette Buna’s coffee to others. Our work has focussed on (a) buying 25 different Bette Buna coffees for ourselves this year, (b) working with partner importers like Ally and Falcon to move it around the world, and (c) linking up with like-minded roasters whenever we can — Curve, Scenery, and Yallah are all involved. 

We've donated £25,000 so far to this project while helping Bette Buna find additional financing to make it all work. We've also helped train their staff to cup coffee and helped with paperwork, the website, and other administrative bits. 

Step 5: Drink coffee

Our idea is simple: When you drink Bette Buna coffees, you're helping us pay for an empowering model of development that unlocks more local freedom — and this genuinely changes the lives of some of the poorest people in the world. Our job, inspired by Amartya Sen, is not to decide what the project should look like, but to enable the people of a remarkable coffee-growing community to innovate, to decide what works, and to build the lives that they have reason to value. 

Ben Szobody and Micah Sherer are the co-founders of Skylark. Micah has years of experience working in the supply chain with producers, exporters, importers, roasters, and cafes. Ben is editor of Cherry Bones magazine.

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