We founded Gorilla Conservation Coffee in 2016, as a social enterprise of CTPH, to support smallholder famers who I often meet while checking on the gorillas. We pay them an above market price for premium or specialty coffee, which improves their income and reduces their need to enter the forest for food and fuelwood. We are currently  engaging 500 farmers through 25 model farmers. I am thrilled that close to half of our coffee farmers are women. Women don’t typically own land in Uganda, so we are also excited to witness a growth of women empowerment. When we started out with 75 coffee farmers only five of them were women.