From the Birthplace of Coffee to my Cup: Celebrating International Women’s Month 2025

By Erika Koss

Last Thursday morning, as I arrived at the crowded gate of the Julius Nyerere Conference center, I heard a familiar voice calling my name: “Erika, wait!”  I was surprised to find my friend Dehab Mesfin Bitewlign smiling at me. She’s the general manager of Diamond Enterprise and Dahab’s specialty coffee farms in Kaffa, Ethiopia. Life had been busy, since I first met her in 2023, and I didn’t know that she, too, would be visiting Dar es Salaam to attend the 21st African Fine Coffee Association conference.  What a joyful surprise!  Smiling from ear to ear, we hugged, shouted, and hugged again—our excited shouts invertedly beckoned the conference photographer to capture the moment:

Reuniting with Dehab led me to reflect once again upon my visit to her farm in 2023, a magical trip both personally and professionally.

At that time, I was in Ethiopia for the International Women in Coffee Association (IWCA) conference in Addis Abeba, Ethiopia, where hundreds of attendees – mostly women – gathered from more than two dozen countries to celebrate our work coffee. The talks and panels on stage featured women’s accomplishments in coffee, as well as honest reflections about ongoing gender gaps.

As part of the conference add-ons, IWCA offered several coffee field trips. Once the locations were posted online, I faced no hesitation:  I signed up for Dehab’s Kaffa origin trip. I wanted to visit the Kaffa Zone, the place in Ethiopia that contains more than 50% of the remaining montane forests. And as the birthplace of wild coffea arabica and the centre of coffee’s genetic diversity, I longed to walk within these forests myself, and dreamed of meeting one of the mother trees of coffee.

Not until arriving to Ethiopia did I learn that this Kafa Biosphere Reserve –now a UNESCO heritage site – is a biodiversity hotspot with an estimated 5,000 wild varieties of plants and endemic agricultural crops.

Even the UNESCO website mentions the “unique coffee culture that is deeply engrained in the Ethiopian economy and history” from this region, featuring a “cultural and linguistic identity quite distinct from the rest of Africa.” More than 600,000 people call this area home, many in rural settlements. Key economic activities are agriculture and conservation, including protecting the vital genetic resources of coffea arabica and its associated ecosystems, especially water.

The Kafa Biosphere Reserve is located approximately 460 km southwest of Addis Abba. For my group, this meant a one-hour plane trip from Addis to the rural city of Jemma, and then a four-hour drive to the Bonga National Forest Priority Area, home to a vast diversity of plant, animal, and invertebrate species.

My group comprised an international group of coffee professionals from around the world, representing several different IWCA chapters:  Costa Rica, Jamaica, Kenya, and the USA.  Gathering at the Addis airport, we were a mighty team of five women: 

·      Marcela, owner of Roble Sabana, a specialty coffee business focused on roasting and exporting women-produced coffee in Costa Rica; 

·      Ruth Ann, founder of Artisan Coffee Imports in Michigan, USA, focused on buying women-produced coffee in East Africa; 

·      Tiffany from New York and whose grandmother was a coffee farmer in Jamaica; &

·      Sarah, who works as a consultant for the International Trade Centre, based out of her home in Athens, Greece.

After all this travel from our global destinations, we were all ready to learn more about Dehab’s  work, and the women who make Kaffa coffee possible. 

Dehab Mesfin Bitewlign: Forest, Farm, & Processing

Despite all the waiting, our timing was perfect.  Arriving in late October 2023, we witnessed one of the busiest times of the harvest season, with freshly picked cherries that had been picked the day before, with even more natural coffee drying on dozens of raised African beds.

Upon arrival, my sense of what “Kaffa Forest Coffee” began to crystalize. With her land of 330 hectares, much of this within the Kaffa Forest biosphere, including 260 hectares of planted coffee.  With this land, Dehab is intentional about preserving 30 hectares of land for some wild coffee and the animals: “because I came to their home, I don’t want them to get disturbed,” she told me.

     Walking through her farm – really much better described as a forest – I found it hard to breathe:  partly because the altitude was 1728-1877 metres above sea level, but also because, despite dozens of coffee farm visits from Nicaragua to Rwanda, the beauty of this forest coffee beyond what I imagined. My senses were overwhelmed in all the best ways:  this was part of the region where coffee originated!

     But at first, Dehab was not involved in the farm itself.  Back in 1999, the farm was purchased by Dehab’s husband and his friend. The two partners continued for 12 years until the friend, sadly, passed away.  By this time, Dehab’s three sons were in school, and she was looking for more ways to spend her time and work.  

     During one moment when we were standing at our highest elevation, I asked Dehab to share the story of how she began in coffee. Her honest, matter-of-fact answer impressed me:

     “At the beginning when I started coffee farming, it fell by chance. I don’t have an answer like, ‘my dream has brought me here,’ no, it’s not like that. Because my husband was a partner with
     his friend and when his friend passed away, we needed someone to take over, so I took over the management. That’s why we’re here.”

But while Dehab’s involvement in 2014 may have originally come from happenstance, she has now created so much more. To learn more about the coffee, she employed a business consultant and agronomist and spent two years learning. Quickly, she realized what makes their farm so unique:  “We have this special coffee because this biosphere is here. If the forest is not there, the coffee will not be there. And we cannot have the coffee without drinkers.”

In the forest, she continued to share more with me:

     “Now when I see the farm, I just love it. The community is so down, and I need to make an influence in the community.  There is so much quality inside our products. I want to influence the
     people around me to do it safely, protecting the forest and without affecting the environment. I want to teach them, the way I do it, I know they can do it.  They need some support so that
     they can improve on quality and get a good price for their products.  Now, that is my dream.”

To date, the farm is 100% managed by Dehab with 27% ownership.

     Currently, Dehab’s farm is mostly producing natural coffees, in part to limit the use of water that washed coffee would require.  Her honey processed natural coffee was glorious to behold, drying on long tables covered with shade to protect them from too much sun.  We saw three different types—white honey, yellow, and black. The stickiness of this method was evident even to the naked eye, proving one way it requires more labour. Because the mucilage makes it so sticky, it takes extra time and labour to turn it around on the drying beds.

     We also saw Dehab’s tanks of anaerobic processed coffee, a method that traps the cherries in fermentation tanks without any oxygen for 72 hours.  With a confirmed buyer for this coffee, anaerobic is worth the efforts because it can fetch higher prices, in some cases anaerobic can bring double her washed or her naturals.

     I felt lucky to witness Dehab’s favorite time of year: harvest season, during which time she employs more than 350 people. As she told me, “You can see, now we have so many employees here, the farm is alive!  Well, it’s always alive, because the plants are alive, but now, during the harvest season, it’s even more life. There are so many energies, so many activities, so many employees involved, I love it!”

     During picking season, more than 60% of the seasonal workers are women. When I asked her to explain the reason why the majority of harvesting is done by women, Dehab replied, “because women need to stay close to farm. They can’t go far from home in terms of their children, or even needing to go back home to make lunch for their husbands.”  

     Despite women’s hard work, they continue to be taken advantage of, because men continue to own the land and so the cash tends to go to men.  This is partly why Dehab’s employment of women is so important:  unique for her area, Dahab pays same men and women. Dehab pays a good wage—7 birr per 1 kg of picked coffee with an average take home of 210 birr per day. A strong man can pick as much as 100 kg during a full day of work, while women tend to pick between 30-50 kgs. 

About the writer:

Erika Koss, PhD, is a writer, educator, and researcher who views coffee through the lens of two life-long passions: literature and human rights. She is an Authorized Specialty Coffee Trainer and a co-creator of SCA’s Coffee Sustainability curriculum. Erika's PhD from Saint Mary’s University in Canada focused on coffee's gendered gaps in Kenya, and she has created a new gender and coffee course to help address this issue more globally.  As the founder of “A World in Your Cup Consulting,” she seeks to advance sustainability, gender equity, and decolonization of the beverage crops through education and research. Born and raised in Los Angeles, Erika lives in Nairobi, Kenya, with her younger son.  

Find Erika on IG: @AWorldinYourCup

www.AWorldinYourCup.com