Welcome to October edition of #WATWB – We are the World Blogfest, where bloggers join in and post something positive that is going on in the world, random acts of kindness.

 

This special coffee company is in a rainforest in Mozambique, with a mission to build 100 schools – helping to keep girls in school one cup of coffee at a time. Every bag of beans sold globally benefits rainforest deforestation, wildlife conservation, or girl’s education.

 

 

“Educating women is educating a nation”

“I don’t want to get married, I want to go to school”

 

This Coffee Company Keeps Girls in School and Protects the Rainforest

 

Many girls in Mozambique drop out of school by the fifth-grade because many families cannot afford secondary school for their daughters. And child marriages are prevalent in the country with 48 percent of girls married by age-18 and 14 percent by age-15 according to the organization Girls Not Brides.

The company’s mission, Eric Wilburn, director of Gorongosa Coffee, told Global Citizen, is for every girl who lives in the national park to complete high school. It could take 15-years for that goal to be fully recognized.

“It costs right now about $500 a year to send the girl to boarding school in Mozambique, and that’s for tuition, room and board, clothes, books, travel — yet most of these families earn less than $1 a day,” he said.

The coffee project’s website tells the story of its founding in Gorongosa National Park – one of the most biodiverse places on the planet –  and about the resiliency of the people and land of Mozambique.

After the 17-year civil war ended in 1992, the land and the people were scarred and suffering. It took a few years but a ground-breaking conservation project to restore the wildlife and ecosystems in Gorongosa National Park began in 2008.

Part of the restoration included investing in the health, education, and employment opportunities of the people who live there, the company said. This, “empowers them to be the guardians of Gorongosa.”

In 2015, the project partnered with local farmers and coffee growing experts to plant coffee on Mount Gorongosa with the goal of restoring the rainforest that had been destroyed by the war and unsustainable farming practices as well as to give farmer’s a dependable income source.

Coffee thrives in the region, and today, farmers are planting 200,000 coffee plants a year along with 100,000 rainforest trees that help the coffee grow. The Gorongosa Trust was set up to fund all the conservation and community efforts. . . continue reading

 

Original Source: This Coffee Company Keeps Girls in School and Protects the Rainforest – Goodnet

 

If you’d like to join in and share a feel good post, you can add your post to the #WATWB Facebook page HERE. We post the last Friday every month. This month’s hosts are:

Sylvia McGrath,
Mary Giese ,
Shilpa Garg,
Sylvia Stein, Belinda Witzenhausen

 

©DGKaye2020