Coffee Kindergartens & Health Clinic Donation

In the Ayarza and Huehuetenango regions of Guatemala, coffee harvesting season coincides with the children's school vacation. For many families in the coffee regions, they are stuck with a dilemma: on one hand, the parents need the income from picking coffee, and on the other, there are limited options for childcare while they work. As the first to bring the Child Labor Monitoring & Remediation System (CLMRS) program to the coffee sector in Guatemala, OFI/Covoya created Coffee Kindergartens and Coffee Camps to support these working families. The communities that receive the Coffee Kindergartens are determined by risks assessments done in the field in partnership with their on-the-ground social workers. Coffee Kindergartens are set up in public schools where children learn, get a meal, and play with other children under the care of competent teachers for 35 school days during peak harvest.

The program started during the 2020-2021 harvest with four Coffee Kindergartens in different coffee growing regions in Huehuetenango and Ayarza/Santa Rosa. During the 2023-2024 harvest, there were 24 Coffee Kindergartens, with each receiving 20 children.

In the community of Manzanillo, Ayarza, the closest local public clinic is an hour plus walk. The Blue Ayarza coffee that we source from Covoya is processed at this mill. To support the local community, Covoya opened a rural health clinic in 2021. The Clinic is open two days a week for walk-ins. The other three days, the nurse is in the field training the surrounding communities on preventive health measures, best practices, and doing home visits. Through field visits, over 2,000 children have been screened for malnutrition, given supplements, and seen at follow up visits. The clinic is provided free of charge and basic medicines are also provided free of charge. In the first two years, the clinic also performed over 700 primary consults in the clinic, and made over 7,000 total visits/trainings/campaigns for common illnesses in the surrounding communities.