We'll take you to Burkina Faso next week!

Word from Christian, founder of Umano fair trade

Good morning!

I announced to you last month that I was going to Cameroon to visit cocoa and peanut producers. I was invited there as part of a project between the University of Sherbrooke and the Foundation for Environment and Development in Cameroon.

But the winds are very changeable these days, especially for Umano. So, I learned last week that the project in Cameroon was postponed due to circumstances beyond our control.

Too late! A part of me was already on the way, flying, to Africa. It was really too late to turn back. 5 years since I set foot on this continent which saw the birth of my passion for fair trade, 2 years without being able to travel, 3 years of commercial partnership with the cooperative which supplied our mangoes and our cashews without having had the pleasure to meet them in real life... I then simply tilted my wings slightly, took the warm air current a few degrees further north and headed for Burkina Faso!

Woaow, well, this time we hope that the winds will be stable for a few more days. So, if everything goes as planned, on May 28 I will arrive in Ouagadougou and the next day I will go to Orodara accompanied by Souleymane Konate, director of the Kenedougou agricultural cooperative .

He also really wants to come and meet us, to meet you, in Quebec. And it is certain that we will have the opportunity to receive him here in the coming months.

In the meantime, I will have the chance to help you discover the life of the cooperative a little better, to understand why fair trade is so important for local communities, to know what really distinguishes a product from a fair value chain for the same product from the agro industry? During this stay, we will try to have concrete answers to these questions.

Burkina Faso is also a country that was one of the first in the world to understand the importance of “consuming locally what is produced locally”. So, at the request of the cooperative, I will lead a creative workshop to explore the possibilities of transforming and promoting their local products of sesame, nuts, fruits, etc. with the aim of selling them in their community, in their country.

See you soon!

Christian