Mutwewathi

La historia de Mutwewathi

Mutwewathi is a washing station of the type known in Kenya as a "factory." It was established in 1965 in Mukurweini, in Nyeri County, on the eastern slopes of the Aberdare Range. For decades, it was part of the large Mukurwe-ini cooperative until the early 2000s, when its producers split off to join the Gikaru cooperative. Thus was born the New Gikaru Farmers Cooperative Society, registered in 2001, which today manages five washing stations and brings together more than 4,600 coffee farmers. Mutwewathi receives cherries from about a thousand smallholders, many of them women. Each cultivates just a few hundred coffee trees on plots of less than half a hectare, on red volcanic soil at altitudes between 1,600 and 1,800 meters, intercropping them with tea, maize, and bananas. Their varieties are SL28 and SL34, the Kenyan classics, alongside Ruiru 11 and Batian, which are more disease-resistant. At the station, the cherries are hand-sorted, depulped, and fermented in tanks with water from the Gura River, washed through channels that separate the beans by density, and slowly dried on African beds for up to three weeks. To protect the environment, the wash water is purified in settling pits before being returned to the ecosystem. The cooperative also supports its members with training in good agricultural practices and with advances to pay for fertilizers and their children's school fees.