CAVEC: Green Chains of Colombian Coffee

Strengthening value chains to make them more sustainable is essential to address our current global challenges in a collaborative manner. This project is designed to address the global environmental challenges humanity faces today, such as biodiversity loss, high deforestation rates, ecosystem degradation, and unsustainable production practices.

Coffee is an essential economic activity in Colombia, yet many Colombian coffee organizations lack the resources and capacity to improve their production and compete in international markets, facing a series of challenges, including new European Union regulations. From this perspective, the most vulnerable are small producers and farmers.

The CAVEC project, running from April 2024 to April 2026, has the general objective of ensuring that Colombian specialty coffee value chains are sustainable and comply with new European regulations and sustainability ambitions, by directly supporting Micro Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs), for their integration into traceable and deforestation-free value chains, with a special focus on capacity building, sustainable and fair practices for small Colombian businesses. A total of 200 MSMEs will receive support to adopt practices to improve business sustainability in compliance with European sustainability requirements and ambitions, and to adopt a product traceability system ensuring that the product is free of deforestation. This in turn will indirectly benefit more than 1,000 families in the Huila department in Colombia and all members of the coffee value chain will be stakeholders within the intervention.

Organizations supporting CAVEC

The CAVEC project is an initiative under the AL-INVEST Verde program, implemented by Inclusive Business Partners, ForumCiv, and the Government of Huila. This project has been carried out with financial support from the European Union, through Sequa, and the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida/ASDI). The content is the sole responsibility of Inclusive Business Partners and ForumCiv and does not necessarily reflect the views of the European Union, Sequa, Sida/ASDI, or the Government of Huila.

As part of the project’s implementation, strategic alliances have been established with local authorities such as the Rural Development Agency and the Mayor’s Office of Neiva.

Digital Services developed through CAVEC (Servicios Digitales construidos a través de CAVEC)

During the implementation of the project, capacity-building processes have been developed for non-profit organizations and coffee-sector MSMEs (micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises) in the department of Huila, focusing on topics that enable them to improve their production practices.

As a result of these training activities and their systematization, two digital services have been developed, which ForumCiv makes available to all stakeholders in the value chain interested in accessing them. The full content of these digital resources is available through the link at the end of this section and is entirely in Spanish.

  1. Training Program for Coffee MSMEs and Non-Profit Organizations (Programa de formación para Mipymes y organizaciones sin ánimo de lucro cafeteras).
  2. Environmental and Social Management System (Sistema de Gestión Ambiental y Social).

Explore the digital services here. (Consulte aquí los servicios digitales).