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Earlier than she ever roasted a single espresso bean, Eva Muthuuri was a gender, coverage advocacy, and institutional strengthening advisor who spent years working throughout Kenya and the continent.
Her work uncovered her to at least one fact that minimize throughout geography and circumstance: the face of poverty in Africa is commonly that of a girl: younger, unskilled, overburdened, and structurally excluded, but nonetheless the spine of the family financial system.
It was this actuality that drove Eva to behave. She noticed how girls, regardless of holding households and communities collectively, have been locked out of worth chains, monetary methods, and the alternatives wanted to thrive. Espresso, Kenya’s satisfaction crop, was no exception. Girls carried a lot of the labour however captured little or no of the worth.
Pushed by a want to reclaim worth for Kenyan girls, particularly girls farmers and to construct a mannequin of financial empowerment rooted in dignity, possession, and group transformation, Eva turned to her roots and established Eva’s Espresso. Hailing from the foothills of Meru, she grew up in a espresso farming homestead and witnessed firsthand how this cultural staple was synonymous with a male-dominated business.
What started as a private mission quickly grew right into a wider motion. Leaving public well being for agriculture was a daring shift, however Eva began with what she had: her financial savings, the flexibility to write down a grant proposal, and an unshakeable perception within the potential of girls farmers. Her financial savings paid for licences and branding, whereas grants helped her mobilise farmers, create male champions, and develop coaching manuals that grounded the enterprise in community-led empowerment.
Property have been constructed alongside the way in which. An opportunity encounter with the proprietor of Behmor, the Guatemalan roaster firm, led to the donation of a roaster and grinder. Distributors stepped in to supply accessible tools, and when demand outgrew the workforce’s processing capability, Eva outsourced to companions with deeper pockets. But the early days weren’t with out resistance. Getting into a aggressive, male-dominated, and sometimes monopolistic business meant coping with scepticism and, at occasions, outright bullying. Questions like “Who is that this girl?” and “The place is she coming from?” have been frequent. However girls farmers believed in her imaginative and prescient. They recognised the honesty of her ambition: a future the place their work translated into true worth and higher livelihoods.
For Eva, the enterprise was by no means nearly espresso. It was, in her personal phrases, “a safety mechanism” a method to make use of the facility of the ladies’s motion to drive financial company by means of the espresso worth chain. It introduced collectively girls farmers, captains of business, and capital companions to unlock productiveness, competitiveness, and financial resilience. It provided girls a pathway out of informality and exclusion, and into constructions that supported them to thrive. In a context the place inhabitants progress outpaces financial progress, households typically spend greater than they earn, deepening cycles of instability, gender-based violence, and generational poverty. Girls bear the brunt of those challenges, and Eva’s Espresso got down to change that one farm, one household, one lady, at a time.
Afreximbank (the ‘Financial institution’) entered Eva’s journey at a pivotal level. By its partnership with ImpactHER, the Financial institution co-developed ShowcaseHER, a programme designed to equip women-led SMEs with enterprise improvement abilities, export readiness, networks, and market entry. For Eva, ShowcaseHER turned a launchpad.
The programme opened doorways that had lengthy been shut by means of export improvement coaching, branding assist, and investor publicity. She started exporting whereas nonetheless present process the programme, accessing markets that had beforehand felt out of attain. Afreximbank’s assist helped refine her enterprise mannequin, strengthen worth addition, and construct a globally aggressive model that retains worth inside Kenya as an alternative of exporting uncooked espresso with restricted return to farmers.
This partnership displays Afreximbank’s broader dedication to nurturing Africa’s MSMEs. In 2024 alone, the Financial institution disbursed US$18.7 billion in financing, together with 111 commerce finance traces enabling greater than 127,000 SME sub-loans throughout 27 international locations reaching girls, youth, and high-impact ventures throughout the continent.
In the present day, Eva’s Espresso produces multiple million kilogrammes of espresso yearly and exports to markets worldwide with out increasing its land by a single acre. Greater than 60 farms, largely women-led, are thriving beneath Eva’s mentorship. Households are feeding their kids, paying faculty charges, and investing of their futures, all powered by a crop they as soon as considered merely as subsistence.
The enterprise continues to develop by means of partnerships in sustainability, seedbeds and nurseries, climate-resilient farming, and a youth coffee-kiosk franchise mannequin that brings younger individuals into the worth chain. Eva’s Espresso has additionally been recognised by the 2025 African Girls Achievers as one of many continent’s high women-led initiatives advancing financial empowerment.
What started as a buying and selling enterprise has now advanced right into a automobile for methods change strengthening worth chains, reworking livelihoods, and redefining what girls in agriculture can obtain when the suitable assist meets decided ambition.
Eva’s journey embodies Afreximbank’s imaginative and prescient for SME transformation throughout Africa: enabling micro-businesses to develop into SMEs, SMEs to scale into mid-sized corporations, and mid-sized companies to evolve into international gamers. That is the ripple impact that powers sustainable financial change.
From her first handwritten postcard to a possible purchaser to seeing her espresso served in cafés throughout continents, Eva’s story is wealthy with objective and risk. As she typically says, “the spirit of espresso unites humanity.” By Afreximbank’s dedication to empowering Africa’s MSMEs, that spirit is spreading one lady, one farm, and one group at a time.
