The Indonesia Country Platform (SCOPI) has spent the past five years developing and promoting a National Sustainability Curriculum for Robusta as well as Arabica coffee – a long road to travel, but one rich with knowledge and opportunity.
Some of these lessons learnt were shared during a coffee discussion (DISKO) entitled “Stories from Indonesia: the journey of training coffee farmers on Good Agricultural Practices and post-harvest techniques”. This virtual session, co-hosted by GCP, brought actors from across the value chain to exchange learnings on the roll out of National Sustainability Curriculum in Indonesia.
“Disseminating the National Sustainability Curriculum to coffee farmers has been a journey. In the past five years, many learnings and success stories have been gathered by the Master Trainers – the front-runners for SCOPI’s programs on the ground. We have observed positive outcomes with farmers in most of the NSC’s working areas,” said Mentari Kesuma, the Executive Director at SCOPI during the virtual event in which challenges such as the climate change impacts, promoting inclusivity of female and youth farmers, ensuring farmers’ regeneration, and strengthening farmers’ financial literacy, were also discussed.
The journey to sustainability in Indonesia included providing coffee farmers in 15 regions with training and assistance on sustainable coffee production.
These trainings were carried out through SCOPI Master Trainers (local government employees, farmer leaders, agronomists and SCOPI member representatives). By the end of 2019, 190 Master Trainers received training and approximately 75 Master Trainers are still active in 13 provinces.
The DISKO forms part of a series of discussions held throughout the year. Originally planned to be in-person events and part of the platform’s 2020 goal to increase communication and education, the series has been no less successful. With innovative thinking and appropriate Covid-19 protocol, the latest DISKO was a hybrid event of live and virtual presentations – a format likely to be used in the future due to its great success.
The agenda included a keynote speech from the Indonesian Ministry of Agriculture, presentations from four Master Trainers and a live coffee brewing demonstration. Participants included a wide range of SCOPI members, Master Trainers, international donors, national and local government, private sector actors, NGOs and academic institutions.