AILSA CHANG, HOST:
In parts of Uganda, coffee is seen as a man's thing, and that includes growing it, selling it, even drinking it. But one woman is challenging the status quo. She has built her own coffee company, and she's buying the beans exclusively from women farmers. As NPR's Fatma Tanis reports, for this entrepreneur, the work is deeply personal.
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FATMA TANIS, BYLINE: We're just a few miles from the Kenyan border with Uganda, hiking up a lush, green hill, pushing past the leaves of banana and coffee trees.
MERIDAH NANDUDU: Only arabica coffee that is grown in this area.
TANIS: Meridah Nandudu grew up in this village. Her parents and grandparents were coffee farmers.
NANDUDU: These are coffee beans. These are red cherries.
TANIS: Her love for this land shines through as we walk under branches full of small, green fruit that are turning red as they ripen.
NANDUDU: Like gold on the trees (laughter).
TANIS: Removing the outer layer of the fruit reveals the coffee bean inside. But as much as Meridah loved her childhood here, her memories of this place are tainted by the violence she saw the women in her community suffer. It got especially worse during harvest season, when couples would argue over money.
NANDUDU: I didn't see my parents fight, but I had my aunties. They would run to our home in the night.
TANIS: ...Trying to get away from their husbands, who were beating them.
NANDUDU: And then also other neighbors, when they have been battered. You hear a man has killed his wife.
TANIS: She says it happened a lot.
NANDUDU: As a child, witnessing violence is something that affected my mind. It's very traumatizing.
TANIS: Her mother told her that if the women had their own money, they would have options to be able to get away from difficult situations, like a violent husband. So Meridah made it a goal to figure out how to help, but she never thought coffee would be the answer. Looking at her parents' very simple lives, she didn't think you could make a lot of money from coffee.
NANDUDU: Like, for me, I had this thing in me, like, I want to be a lawyer.
TANIS: But as an adult, she tells me, her life took unexpected turns. Now, at 35 years old, Meridah has built her own business, and it's a coffee company called Bayaaya, which means sisterhood. The path to get here, though, was not an easy one.
NANDUDU: I think one of the things that has pushed me so much is my personal story.
TANIS: Meridah eventually left her village to go to college and then grad school. She got married and had two kids. And as the years went by, Meridah found herself trapped, like so many of the women in her village. Her husband was controlling and he wouldn't allow her to work. Five years into their marriage, he suddenly left. Not long after, as she was sitting home one day, exhausted, with no money, no job, destitute and crying, she had an epiphany.
NANDUDU: I've been able to go to the best universities in the country. And then I have the knowledge. I also have skills.
TANIS: She thought about the women back in her village who never got a chance to go to school and learn other skills.
NANDUDU: How is she going to come out of what she's in right now? And then, immediately, I start now reorganizing my brain, like restructuring myself.
TANIS: So she decided to go back to her village and try to build a coffee business.
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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: (Non-English language spoken).
TANIS: We're driving from the village to the Bayaaya coffee warehouse in Mbale in eastern Uganda, where Meridah and her employees turn the dried coffee she buys from farmers into green coffee that will be sold to roasters.
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NANDUDU: Yes.
TANIS: In her office, Meridah brews some coffee.
NANDUDU: Medium roast.
TANIS: Medium roast? Yeah?
NANDUDU: Yes. It's my favorite.
TANIS: OK.
NANDUDU: Yeah.
TANIS: Why?
NANDUDU: It brings out all the attributes in coffee. Yes. It brings out the caramels, the body of the coffee, the chocolate flavors.
TANIS: When she first started her business, she realized there was a lot she didn't know.
NANDUDU: So I enter into coffee, and then I begin making mistakes - quality mistakes.
TANIS: She says her mistakes cost her a lot of money, and she wanted to learn how to avoid making them. She heard about a program funded by the Netherlands that offered business training to young entrepreneurs in Uganda. After three months in the program, Meridah's life changed. She says the training helped her learn how to run a coffee business and how to make money from it.
NANDUDU: I saw that coffee is something that can change a life of a woman. It's something that can change the life of the community. So I started, like, preaching a coffee gospel to the women, for them to understand the value that is in coffee.
TANIS: That gospel was teaching the women how to grow a higher-quality crop. Meridah started with a few farmers, but she encountered some resistance from the men in the village.
NANDUDU: It was a bit tough because - as we all know that coffee is a male-dominated thing.
TANIS: The husbands wouldn't allow their wives to sell the coffee at all.
NANDUDU: So basically, women would do what we call the donkey work. They're doing the farming, the weeding, the harvesting.
TANIS: And the money from all that work would go directly to the man of the house. So Meridah came up with a plan to get money into the hands of the women. She went to the farmers' homes one by one and offered an incentive - an extra 200 Ugandan shillings per kilo of coffee beans - that's 6 cents a kilo - if their wives could sell directly to her. Slowly, the men agreed.
Five years later, Meridah now buys from over 600 women farmers. She's won awards and has been featured in local news. Jackie Aldrette is with AVSI, the organization that provided Meridah's training. She says Meridah's success is an inspiration to others who also grew up with limited resources.
JACKIE ALDRETTE: There are so many people like her that are just ready to do great things and yet just haven't had an opportunity to be lifted up.
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NANDUDU: (Non-English language spoken, laughter).
TANIS: Back at a coffee farm in Meridah's village, we meet Juliet Kwaga as she's picking the red coffee cherries and putting them in a blue bucket.
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TANIS: Juliet is 31 years old with three kids, and was one of the first farmers who sold her beans to Meridah.
JULIET KWAGA: She taught me how to use manure in my farm.
TANIS: Juliet says she used to have to ask her husband for money for the most basic needs, like buying soap or paying school fees for her children. It led to constant fighting.
KWAGA: But right now, I can take my child to school. I don't overdepend on my husband.
TANIS: Being able to make her own money has also brought peace to her home, she says.
KWAGA: Life has changed. It's not like before.
TANIS: For Meridah, the dream is only just beginning. She wants to be able to roast her own coffee and export it too. For now, she's proud of Juliet and the many other women like her who are earning their own money and taking control of their lives.
NANDUDU: And even if a man walked away, she wouldn't really be so much bothered because she knows, I can take care of my children, even without this man.
TANIS: At the end of the day, she says, that is all that matters.
Fatma Tanis, NPR News, Mbale, Uganda.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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