Beans of Hope

The ‘Beans of Hope’ project was established in Railaco villages in the Ermera District of Timor Leste in 2015. From small beginnings, it has grown to include 665 farmers.

The goal is to improve the livelihoods of farmers through generating sustainable and fair income from vanilla farming.

This is being achieved through delivery of training, support and mentoring in financial literacy, farming techniques, literacy, numeracy and human rights. The initiative also links farmers to relevant local authorities and vanilla buyers.

The next phase of the project is to build the farmers’ capacity to establish and manage cooperatives so that they can independently grow, process, package and sell vanilla competitively and use the profits to benefit their communities. Registering cooperatives is quite a lengthy process and is expected to take around 2 years with support from the Timorese government.