A new fundraising campaign for supporting coffee farmers

Oxfam is launching a new campaign called “Coffee4Change” to raise funds for its work with coffee farmers and workers around the world. The campaign begins Oct 1 to coincide with the inaugural International Coffee Day.

Oxfam has coffee programs in Haiti, Honduras, Timor-Leste, Papua New Guinea and Uganda and needs €1.2 million to run and expand them.

• In Haiti Oxfam is helping farmers with new techniques to cope with the effects of a severe drought, followed by floods last year.
• In Honduras it has provided new micro-organisms to help farmers “fight the fungi” of the debilitating coffee rust disease.
• In Timor-Leste Oxfam is supporting a local partner to increase coffee growers’ productivity and profits via a farmers’ cooperative. 
• In Uganda it’s helping to organise local farmers including by building small central processing factories called “micro-stations” so they can add value to their raw crops.
• In Papua New Guinea Oxfam is helping coffee farmers with a bee-keeping initiative to both help their crop yields and give them added income in honey production.

The idea for the campaign comes from the old Neapolitan tradition of Caffe Sospeso, where someone would buy a second cup of coffee alongside their own for charity. Our modern-day equivalent will be on-line via a campaign website coffee4change.oxfam.org.

Oxfam is running "Coffee4Change" with the International Coffee Organization. It will launch at the Global Coffee Forum at Expo 2015 in Milan, Italy and run throughout October. Oxfam will run "Coffee4Change" in Italy, America, New Zealand, Ireland and Hong Kong. In some of these countries there will be in-store promotions too. In Italy for example, beginning at the Expo 2015, Oxfam will also partner with the Illy and Lavazza coffee companies who’ll be promoting Caffe Sospesos in their stores too.