Kua Tree Nursery
Coffee needs a stable climate, and it's losing one. Rising temperatures and unpredictable rain are already hitting smallholder farmers, who grow most of the world's coffee and have the least room to absorb a bad season. Without action, up to half of the world's coffee-growing land could be unsuitable by 2050.
On Mt Elgon, that pressure shows up on the slopes. Without shade, coffee plants get stressed. Without roots holding the ground, heavy rain strips away topsoil. Trees fix a lot of this, but most farmers can't easily get seedlings, and nurseries are a long way from their farms.
Zukuka Bora already grows and gives away around 65,000 trees a year to farmers on the Wanale and Bukhanakwa ridge. The focus is slow-growing indigenous species like Mvule, Musizi and Cordia Africana, which shade the coffee, hold the soil on steep slopes and bring back biodiversity.
The next step is a nursery at every Zukuka Bora site. Farmers collect seedlings when they drop off their coffee, so planting trees becomes part of the harvest rather than an extra trip. At full scale, the nurseries could supply more than a million seedlings a year.
Zukuka Bora is also working towards certified carbon credits. Measuring and verifying the carbon these trees store could create a new income stream for farming communities, on top of better coffee.
Kua Coffee makes it happen. Kua gives $1 to The Cup That Counts for every kilo of coffee it roasts, and that money funds climate resilience work with Zukuka Bora. In 2025 that came to $11,735, all going into the tree nursery program.
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