EAST AFRICAN SCHOOL OF COFFEE
If Raphaël Prime (Rapha) is anything, he’s passionate. You can’t be around him for five full minutes before that passion rubs off on you. It just so happens, for all of our sakes, that his fervor is very directed at the state of specialty coffee in Kenya. Rapha’s CV is packed full of working with specialty exporters and helping some of the world’s most famous specialty coffee roasters select their ideal microlots in Kenya to roast and serve. This work entrenched him in knowledge of the supply chain throughout the country and galvanized his relationships to all the who’s who of Kenyan coffee. Now, he currently directs that energy into his organization called East African School of Coffee. The EASC is a training platform to empower coffee professionals and enthusiasts through in-depth practical coffee knowledge coupled with their insatiable passion for coffee.
Rapha and the EASC currently provide support and services to farmers from the central highlands who are interested in exploring the newly opened ‘direct export’ option that's now available to Kenyan coffee farmers. This year, our Community Blend Give Back program is focused on extending this opportunity 400 kilometers to the Western Rift Valley, shifting the weight of specialty coffee competency outside the central highlands and into the west side of the country. We see, through partners like Stephen Nandela at Muinami Estate, a real opportunity to partner with some burgeoning coffee producers. Connecting the dots between EASC and the producers in the west will allow them to build their own QC labs, assemble QC teams, and make the quality loop more vertically integrated and sustainable.
The international portion of this semester’s Community Blend Give Back will fund scholarships for producers from the Kitale region in the west to spend some valuable time training with the pros at the EASC in Nairobi. We hope you’ll follow along with the development of this relationship, and we look forward to sharing in the fruitfulness of it.