Learn about our newest natural process coffee from Guji, Ethiopia, and the life and family of Biniyam Aklilu, who owns Shakiso Washing Station.

Biniyam Aklilu is a fourth generation coffee farmer whose great-grandfather started a coffee farm in the 1960s—about two whole governments ago. Biniyam’s grandfather built the first privately-owned washing station in Guji and his father founded Nardos Coffee in 1998, an exporting business for the washing station owned by the Aklilu family. Now, Nardos Coffee operates nine washing stations across multiple regions.

Biniyam, a self-starter inspired by several lifetimes of coffee farming, founded his own export business called Gujoo Coffee. In a sense, he is Ethiopian coffee royalty.

In his home region of Guji, coffee is spun thread handwoven into the fabric of social culture: in the community, coffee is shared for hospitality, solving local disputes, and gifting to newlyweds. Through Biniyam, coffee also brings new resources to the area. With access to international trade, he’s able to reinvest in initiatives like distributing reusable menstrual kits to school-age girls (to prevent dropouts due to lack of supplies) and subsidizing high school textbooks. In the future, he hopes to work on infrastructure for schools, clean water, and roads to service the areas surrounding his washing stations. Here is a video tour of one of his washing stations.

For local coffee farmers, Biniyam has used his access to the global market to bring in premium prices, educate on soil management and tree pruning, demonstrate how to revive aging trees, and distribute new seedlings to producers. In Ethiopia broadly, he aims to help bolster the economy by attracting external markets and currency.

While Biniyam Aklilu’s story is exceptional, we can expect more producers like him to crop up following Ethiopia’s deregulation of licensing requirements to access the global market. Ethiopian coffee infrastructure is constructed the way it is—with decentralized smallholder/family farms, using heirloom cultivars, selling their harvests to public or cooperatively owned washing stations—because of limited federal resources going directly to coffee industry growth and trade export middlemen further siphoning market value away from these producing communities. In the wake of privatization, the proposed pathway to development is not more funding or initiatives, but more free trade.

With the new addition of Cup of Excellence Ethiopia and global communications allowing for greater supply chain transparency, the landscape for coffee producers is open for new specialty experimentation, albeit by those who already have some resources at their disposal.

This deregulation of market access resembles one of the Washington Consensus policies commonly required by the International Monetary Fund for loan agreements to developing countries. The broader lending programs, called structural adjustment, are conditional loan agreements that require borrower countries to adopt the austerity policies of supply-side economics. They have been largely criticized due to their lack of empirical efficacy; in other words, these policies are keeping GDP low and denying adequate development for long-term economic growth. The IMF has been supplying loans to the Ethiopian government since before the collapse of the socialist military junta government in 1991.