Sustainable Harvest Launches Online Producer Education Platform EDU

Sustainable Harvest press photo.

Portland, Oregon-based coffee trading company Sustainable Harvest has launched a producer-focused online education platform called EDU.

Currently available in beta form to certain participants in Sustainable Harvest’s “Most Valuable Producer (MVP)” program, the EDU platform is designed to improve the livelihoods of coffee-farming families by offering free online education and tools that are readily accessible at users’ convenience.

The first two education courses on the platform, available for now only in Spanish, are a green coffee quality management course and a coffee nursery management course. Both courses feature numerous education modules with videos, tests and additional downloadable technical resources.

For the course on nurseries, Sustainable Harvest turned to the expertise of partners from World Coffee Research and the innovation laboratory of the Inter-American Development Bank Group, IDB Lab.

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“EDU has been an idea we’ve tinkered with for the last few years, and we realized that the pandemic created both new human behaviors such as mainstream adoption of digital learning, as well as better and improved tech to deliver content,” Sustainable Harvest Chief Impact Officer Kellem Emanuele told DCN via email. “The combination of these two factors allows for a new era in capacity building for the coffee sector.”

The beta launch opens the free platform up to 58 producer organizations in Peru, Honduras, Nicaragua and Colombia. Sustainable Harvest says it plans to offer and English-language version later in 2022 for the benefit of producers in other parts of the world.

Emanuele said that additional courses through the EDU platform will be driven by feedback from producers and are likely to be aligned with some of the MVP program’s core pillars, including technical knowledge, market access, leadership skills, gender equity, youth engagement and climate action.

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