Strengthening value chains to make them more sustainable is essential to address our current global challenges in a collaborative manner. Coffee is an essential economic activity in Colombia, yet many Colombian coffee organizations lack the resources and capacity to improve their production and compete in international markets, facing a series of challenges, including new European Union regulations. From this perspective, the most vulnerable are small producers and farmers.

The CAVEC project, running from April 2024 to April 2026, has the general objective of ensuring that Colombian specialty coffee value chains are sustainable and comply with new European regulations and sustainability ambitions, by directly supporting Micro Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs), for their integration into traceable and deforestation-free value chains, with a special focus on capacity building, sustainable and fair practices for small Colombian businesses. A total of 200 MSMEs will receive support to adopt practices to improve business sustainability in compliance with European sustainability requirements and ambitions, and to adopt a product traceability system ensuring that the product is free of deforestation. This in turn will indirectly benefit more than 1,000 families in the Huila department in Colombia and all members of the coffee value chain will be stakeholders within the intervention.

The executing consortium is Inclusive Business Partners (IBP), ForumCiv and the Government of the Department of Huila in Colombia. This project has been carried out with the financial support of the European Union, through Sequa. Its content is the exclusive responsibility of Inclusive Business Partners and does not necessarily reflect the opinions of the European Union, sequa or the consortium responsible for the execution of the AL-INVEST Verde program.

For more information about this project, please contact: Daniella Mendoza, Tecnical Director of CAVEC daniella.mendoza@inclusivebusiness.se