Coffee Beanies took the first steps in 2018. We love knitting and equality. Our purpose is to give African women new opportunities for a life of dignity. We do this by training them to hand-knit beautiful products that we can sell in the Nordics. We provide everything they need: training, materials, and a secure income.
Our mission is simply to create jobs for people in the coffee mountains of the world’s poorest country—Burundi in Africa.
The women knitting in Burundi - and a visit from Denmark
Production in Burundi is entirely manual—everything is hand-knitted. The local women themselves organize the training of new groups. Coffee Beanies finances the materials and salaries for the trainers. The knitters don’t pay anything out of pocket—instead, we buy everything they make as soon as the quality reaches a sellable standard. There is no minimum or maximum production requirement.
Our high-quality yarn is eco-friendly—either biodegradable wool, recycled polyamide, or yarn that would otherwise have been burned. We have zero waste.
Items that do not sell are unraveled and recycled.
We are committed to paying living wages—not just minimum wages. Some knitters choose to work full-time, while others knit in between farming and caring for some of the world’s largest families. We give them full freedom to choose whether they want to knit at home or together with other knitters.
One beanie means one week of food for one person in Burundi. One sweater puts food on the table for an entire family for a week, or pays for a school uniform for one child—or a health insurance plan for a whole family for a year.
We continuously offer our knitters opportunities to learn new skills. They have also learned to crochet and how to dye yarn.
Some of the women knitting together