Coffee Project in Tanzania
Jan 21, 2025 12:00 PM
Jamie Kyles
Coffee Project in Tanzania

Jamie Kyles holds a BSc degree in Engineering Physics from Queens University at Kingston.  His employment history includes 30 years with Shell Canada in various technical and management positions in Calgary and Toronto. In 2006 he spent 5 months working in Western Darfur area of Sudan on a State Dept project supporting the AU peace keeping force. For three years 2007 to 2009 he took on three, 4 month volunteer business advisory placements with VSO (now CUSO) in East Africa. (1) Learned about East African coffee, (2) partnered with a high quality Tanzanian NGO, (3) worked with NGO staff to create Kolcafé the first coffee project in 2011 / 2012. He has undertaken various project advisory / evaluation work for the UNEP SEED competition and the Gates Foundation. He lived in Victoria for more than 20 years and is a member of the Rotary Club of Victoria-Harbourside, he is married with 2 children, 20+ years in Victoria.  He declares that he is an addicted kite surfer.

Jamie has been working on projects in Africa for 12 years and has several things going in Tanzania. The project administrator is the Kolping Society of Tanzania - a lay ministry of the Catholic Church, in cooperation with the Bukoka Kagera-Uhuru Rotary Club. The Kolping Society runs a school, with donations largely from Europe and it is a quality operation.
 
The project not only teaches farmers ways to improve their yields and profits from their coffee crops, they also teach coping skills, cooperative skills and social obligation so they can work together to take advantage of learning from each other and collaborating together as a community.  For example, the women are taught to keep the accounts and they bank money to buy manure to mulch which adds nutrients to greatly increase their yield.  It also increases the water retention, so lessens the amount of water required.  The coffee they raise is Robusta Coffee and the husks are used in the manure compost. As they make more money from their coffee crops, they have more money to pay for food for their families.