Rural Development

The founders of a microfinance website I came across a few months ago are giving an interesting, benevolent twist to social networking. At least, that’s one way of looking at Wokai.org, a non-profit organization benefiting entrepreneurs in rural China.

Wokai has been dubbed by some as a “Facebook for farmers,” yet it may be more comparable to well-known microfinance sites like Kiva, which allow people with an Internet connection to give loans directly to entrepreneurs in developing countries. Wokai, however, focuses solely on impoverished people living in rural China.

Elimbari is one of Kongo Coffee's  special reserve coffees. Kongo is one of the country’s three largest exporters in Papua New Guinea.

Goroka is the provincial capital in the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea, and home to extensive networks of smallholder coffee producers.  PNG’s fertile lands produce a broad range of tropical and temperate crops, and the 85 percent or more of the population who live in rural areas combine household food production with cash crops. Cash is needed to pay school fees for kids, pay for transport to health posts and then meet doctor and medicine charges. Cash also has become critical for many non-market exchanges such as bride prices, funeral and compensation payments, and other social obligations. While the performance of food crops has been good and has kept pace with population growth, PNG’s main cash crops, including coffee and cocoa, has been below potential.

Coffee production is the backbone of the rural economy in the Highlands; across the nation, approximately 2-2.5 million of PNG’s 6 million people depend on coffee production for cash needs. Almost all coffee produced in PNG is arabica, and exporters see a sustained demand for PNG coffee with markets able to absorb a doubling of high-quality premium smallholder product. The challenge for PNG coffee growers is to produce consistently the quantity and quality required by those markets.