CFC CERTIFICATION PROJECT DEEPENS

A group of ten Trainers of Trainers (TOT) and four auditors are scheduled to have a number of training sessions this month and next week respectively for the ongoing coffee verification and certification which is a project funded by the Common Fund for Commodities (CFC) who mandated the East African Fine Coffees Association (EAFCA) to over see the implementation of the project in nine member countries.

The training for the TOT’s comes as the next phase of the project kicks in after the Master trainers who had undergone training in Nairobi in June 2011 are ready to teach the TOT’s on the different standards of certification. The training becomes so critical in that the TOT’s chosen are most important personnel to the project because they have the challenging task of teaching the farmers the different certification standards of UTZ, fair-trade, Rainforest alliance, 4C and Organic translated in the various local languages that farmers are more comfortable with .

In the same time line two of the four auditors will undergo a 22 working day , first batch training in Nairobi on the 8th August 2011 which will see them fully fledged auditors under Africert for which they will sit two set of exams set by national and international certification bodies . This opportunity will open doors for the participants as it has been indicated that there is a lack of properly trained auditors on continent.

The project was formed to train farmers towards good agricultural and management practices that would ultimately lead to their coffee being verified and certified with the fact that it is no longer a case of if the future will be determined by certified coffees but rather a case of when.This project being a pilot project will determine the existence and success of future projects that will be implemented as the industry turns its attention to certified coffees.