Kahawa 1893's Margaret Nyamumbo on disrupting fair trade in the global coffee industry

African Tech Roundup

Kenyan Margaret "Maggie" Nyamumbo is the Founder and CEO of Kahawa 1893, a San Francisco-based coffee company intent on revolutionising the global coffee supply chain and closing the industry's abhorrent gender gap. Prior to launching her bid to "disrupt fair trade" in the international coffee sector, Margaret worked on Wall Street evaluating retail and consumer companies, and, before that, she was a Private Sector Development Consultant specialising in emerging economies at the World Bank. Margaret holds an MBA from Harvard Business School and studied Economics at Smith College and at the London School of Economics. In this conversation with Andile Masuku - published in celebration of International Women's Day 2019 - Margaret eloquently unpacks the economic inequity that persists in the global coffee industry and explains how blockchain technologies could be used to help small coffee farmers get paid more fairly and to efficiently track the journey of speciality coffees from farm to cup.