MBALE, eastern Uganda — Meridah Nandudu brews a medium roast coffee at the headquarters of Bayaaya Specialty Coffee, a company she founded and runs.
"Medium roast is my favorite," she says, taking a deep inhale of her full cup. "It brings out the caramels, the body of the coffee, the chocolate flavors."
But coffee is more than just a drink to her. It's a critical part of her life story and her work to improve the lives of women in her community.
But she could never have imagined that coffee would play a role in charting her own course.
A daughter of coffee farmers
Nandudu grew up in the remote village of Bugibulungu, near the border with Kenya, on a hill lush with banana and arabica coffee trees. Her parents and grandparents were coffee farmers.
But she was not interested in following in their footsteps.
Part of that was due to the gender dynamics that played out in front of her: In this part of Uganda, coffee is seen as a man's thing, including producing it, selling it and consuming it. Women are reluctant to even drink coffee because there is a belief that it will affect their fertility. But they do play an invisible and thankless role in the industry: They help grow the beans.
Based on what she had seen growing up, Nandudu also didn't think there was a lot of money to be made from coffee.
"We're basically involved in the field work, like you're going to the farm with your mother — you're planting, you're harvesting. Then when the coffee is ready, our dad would come and just pick it, and then he goes and sells," she says. "So we didn't know the value that came with a kilo of coffee."
Big dreams that didn't come true
Nandudu's grand dream was to leave her village, create a new life for herself and one day come back to the village to help the women there.
As much as she loved her village and her childhood, Nandudu says, her memories are tainted by the violence and abuse she saw the women in her community suffer. Harvest season was the worst, Nandudu says, because couples would fight over how to spend the money earned from coffee farming, leading to a surge in domestic violence.
"As a child, witnessing violence is something that affected my mind. It's very traumatizing," Nandudu says, recalling the times when her aunts and other neighbors came to her family's home in the middle of the night, seeking refuge from a husband who was beating them. Every now and then, she would hear that a man from the village had killed his wife.
Nandudu's mother told her that if the women in her community had their own money, it would give them options to help them get away from a difficult situation — like an abusive spouse.
"Most of these violence cases came as a result of women being overly dependent on their husbands," Nandudu says. Her neighbors would also regularly come to their house asking for basic goods like salt or sugar, afraid to tell their husbands to go buy them, because it would lead to violence.
"I kept telling myself, like one day, if an opportunity comes up, I must come back here and change the life of [the women] in my community," she says.
With her mother's encouragement, Nandudu dreamed of going to college and becoming a lawyer.
She left her village to study in Kampala, Uganda's capital. But she was not able to get into the law department. Instead she studied social work and later completed a postgraduate diploma in project management.
She struggled to find a job, however, because of high unemployment rates.
And that's when she began to think about coffee again. She had learned that coffee is one of Uganda's top exports and that there was indeed money to be made. So she thought about opening up a coffee business.
But that took a while.
Eventually, Nandudu married and had two kids. As the years went by, she felt trapped, like many of the women she knew in her village, with a controlling husband.
"He was holding me back," Nandudu says. "I was a stay-at-home mother. I was not supposed to work. I could not do any business, so I had to rely fully on my husband."
In 2020, five years into their marriage, when Nandudu was 30 years old, her husband suddenly left. One day not long after, as she was sitting at home, exhausted, with no money and no job, destitute and crying, she had an epiphany.
"I started having these thoughts in my head. Like I've been able to go to the best universities in the country, and then I have the knowledge — I also have skills," Nandudu says. In that moment, she thought about the women back in her village, who never got a chance to go to school and didn't have the skills she had learned: How would they be able to get out of the situation they were in?
"And then immediately I started reorganizing my brain, like restructuring myself," she says. "It motivated me because I saw myself as having everything that can lift me [up from this situation]."
Returning to her coffee roots
Nandudu decided to go back to her village and try to build a specialty coffee business — buying from the farmers in her village and selling the dry beans to roasters and exporters.
But she quickly realized there was a lot she didn't know.
"I enter into coffee, and then I begin making mistakes, quality mistakes," Nandudu says — such as not drying the beans fully or storing them near livestock, which interfered with the smell of the beans.
Those mistakes cost her a lot of money and wasted beans. She knew she needed guidance but couldn't afford courses that would provide training.
That same year, in 2020, she heard about a program funded by the Netherlands that offered free business training to young entrepreneurs working in agriculture in Uganda. After just three months in the program, Nandudu says her whole life changed.
She learned how to take care of coffee trees for high-quality beans, how to get the most yield from the crop and how to maintain the quality of the bean once it has been picked from the tree and goes through the whole process, until it dries. She also learned about finances, how to use a bank for business and how to save money. It helped her see that by having a successful business, she could help others too.
"I saw that coffee is literally, it's a gold that is seated on our trees," she says.
"It's something that can change the life of a woman. So I started, like, preaching a coffee gospel to the women [in the village] for them to understand the value that is in coffee," Nandudu says.
She started with a small group of five women farmers from her village, teaching them what she had learned in her training, and convinced them to sell their coffee beans to her.
But she encountered resistance from the men in the village.
"It was a bit tough because, as we all know, coffee is a male-dominated thing," she says. The husbands wouldn't allow their wives to sell the coffee at all.
"So basically, women would do what we call donkey work. They're doing the farming, the weeding, the harvesting, the pulping, the drying."
But the money from all that work would go directly to the man of the house.
"And the moment [the men] go and sell the coffee, some of them don't come back home for two weeks — they disappear. They come back home when they have drunk off all the money. And now the woman cannot question: Where is the money? Or ask for some to pay the children's school fees. They didn't have that voice."
So Nandudu devised a plan to get money directly into the hands of the women. She went to the male farmers' homes one by one and offered an incentive: an extra 200 Ugandan shillings (about 6 U.S. cents) per kilogram of coffee from her own profits if their wives could sell directly to her. The incentive money also went to the women, but the men recognized it would ultimately mean more money for their households, she says.
Slowly, the men agreed, and many have come to accept that their wives are making their own money now. Some of the women farmers also told NPR that their financial independence allowed them to leave their abusive partner.
Hundreds of women farmers
Five years later, Nandudu now buys from over 600 women farmers, and several hundred male farmers too. She has won awards and grants that have helped her grow her company. Her mission and her success have become an inspiration to many other aspiring entrepreneurs in Uganda who also grew up with limited resources, according to Jackie Aldrette, executive director of AVSI-USA, the organization that provided Nandudu's training with funding from the Netherlands.
"The energy of a true protagonist spills over and lifts others as well, and today we see Meridah creating jobs and inspiring hundreds of her peers," Aldrette says. "There are so many people like her that are just ready to do great things [but] haven't had an opportunity to be lifted up."
Juliet Kwaga, 31, is one of the first farmers who sold her beans to Nandudu.
"She taught me how to use manure in my farm, so I can get higher yields," Kwaga says, and how to dig trenches for drainage and how to prevent soil erosion during heavy rains.
Kwaga says her life looks a lot different now that she has her own money. Before, she used to have to ask her husband for money for the most basic needs, like soap or paying school fees for her children. It led to constant fights.
"But right now, I can take my child to school, buy my basic needs. I don't overly depend on my husband [who continues to farm and sell coffee]."
For Nandudu, the dream is only just beginning. She wants to expand her business and be able to roast her own coffee and export it too.
"So we are looking at exporting our own coffee by the end of this year. And then we are also looking at creating more employment for women," she says.
Her motivation remains the same as it was on the day she had her epiphany: "[To see] a woman empowered, [to see] a woman's life changing from being that woman that would literally have to beg to being a woman that can make decisions," Nandudu says.
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