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.