Introducing Corcasan, our first Nicaraguan coffee and our first offering from our partners at Café Femenino!
The Café Femenino Nicaragua Program began in 2009 with the initiative and guidance of Diana Martinez, director of the influential nonprofit known as La Fem. Martinez has spent most of her life working with the marginalized rural women of Nicaragua and helping them overcome oppressive obstacles and hardship they face in remote, coffee-growing regions. When Martinez learned of Café Femenino’s commitment to providing women coffee farmers with compensation and tools to rise up from unfair, poverty-stricken circumstances, she knew that she had found a program committed to the same values, and results, to which she had devoted her career. La Fem soon began working with a group of women farmers who went on to join the Café Femenino program after forming their own cooperative, Las Diosas. When roya hit, destroying their coffee plants, the women persevered despite a shortage in specialty coffee to produce and export. During this shortage, the women farmers worked with the Café Femenino program to create a 5-year strategic plan to organize a second Nicaragua Program through the
CORCASAN cooperative. This program joined the Café Femenino program in 2017.
We're excited to share this amazing coffee and amazing story with you!
Coffee Profile
Roast Level: Medium
Tasting Notes: Creamy mouthfeel, bright citrus acidity, dark chocolate, walnut
Origin: Nicaragua
Region: Madriz Department
Altitude: 1,200 meters asl
Varietals: Caturra, Catuai, Bourbon, Catimor, Maragogype
Processing Method: Washed and sundried in raised beds
How the Program Impacts Their Communities
Family Education
The women of Café Femenino Nicaragua voted to increase the income of their families by receiving their Café Femenino premium individually. With this added income controlled by the women themselves, the women have been able to fund educational necessities for their children and to send their daughters to school—often making
them the first women in their families to receive formal education.
Community Health
The women have requested, received and administered grant funding through the Café Femenino Foundation to provide reproductive health and cervical cancer screening to the women in their communities. Through their initiative, the women have been able to offer this essential health screening to women across five distinct communities in remote and rural areas who would otherwise not have access to even the most
basic preventative health support.
Economic Empowerment
Since organizing in 2009, the women farmers of the Café Femenino Nicaragua Program have emphasized creating spaces where women can focus on what matters most to
them, and to question—and confront—the powers that have historically oppressed them. In fact, the first initiative of the Café Femenino Nicaragua Program was organizing the Social Construction of the Woman Workshop, an opportunity to analyze the powerful, often negative, social forces at work in their communities, and strategize
approaches to building better, more fair lives, for themselves, their families, and generations to come.
Over the years, the Café Femenino Nicaragua Program has remained committed to not only providing their members with economic autonomy never before reached by the
women in their communities, but also to providing their members with the educational tools needed to rise up from generations of ingrained societal and
psychological oppression.