Dehab Mesfin

Expertise: coffee agriculture, coffee sustainability, coffee processing, coffee entrepreneurship, sustainable agriculture

Coffee insight: In Ethiopia, coffee is traditionally served with a pinch of salt!

Coffee fun fact: There is no electricity on Dehab’s farm; to create honey-processed coffees, they use a hand pulper and then dry the beans on raised beds that are closely monitored for 20 to 25 days.

Dehab was a professional accountant and had spent her career working in finance and administration as an auditor and a cost and budget division head for numerous different companies. As Dehab describes it, “I came to the coffee business by coincidence.”

She and her husband were shareholders in a coffee farm in southwest Ethiopia, but they’d never even visited the farm until one of their partners passed away. Initially they traveled to the farm to see it first-hand so they could make decisions about how to move forward with the business.

After seeing the farm and learning more about the Kafa Biosphere Reserve, which is home to their farm, she was inspired to take on the responsibility of managing the operation herself.

Today Dehab is the general manager of Diamond Enterprise and Dahab Specialty Farm, a specialty coffee farm of more than 300 hectares (650 acres) nestled within the buffer zone of Ethiopia’s Kafa Biosphere Reserve, the largest UNESCO biosphere reserve in the country.

In fact, the Kafa Zone was designated as a protected area in part because of its rich connection to coffee history; its rainforests are the natural home of more than 5000 wild Coffea arabica varieties and are famously linked with one of coffee’s most popular origin stories. Legend has it that a local goatherder named Kaldi noticed that some of his goats seemed unusually energetic after eating berries from a particular tree; after trying the fruit himself and noticing a boom in his own energy, he set out to spread the word about this incredible plant—what we today call Coffea arabica.

Beyond their prized Arabica green coffee—which they offer in natural, honey-processed, and anaerobic processed varieties—Dahab Specialty Farm also produces and exports two more unique products: three types of teas and three varieties of local honey.

Dehab’s work is driven by two powerful pillars: empowering women and ensuring environmental sustainability. Her farm’s unique location provides a front-row seat to the delicate balance between coffee cultivation and nature preservation.

Kafa’s protected status underscores the incredible benefits of sustainable agricultural practices, not only for the environment but also for the flavor of the coffee. Dehab says that because their coffees are grown within the forest, the cherries mature slowly, giving the coffee beans a unique flavor while helping reduce the degradation of the forest.

Dehab is also passionate about empowering women in her local community. Her full-time, permanent staff includes a dozen women. Recognizing a gender gap in administrative roles in her local area, Dehab has helped them gain training in key administrative tasks, like managing coffee storage and documentation. More than sixty percent of her seasonal employees are also women. Her expansion into the raw honey market was rooted in her commitment to supporting local women by providing them training in beekeeping, empowering them to generate income for their families.

For Dehab, “Coffee is not only a drink. It’s by far better than that.” In Ethiopia, coffee plays an important role in bringing the community together. Every family prepares coffee at least once—and sometimes up to three times—per day. The process typically takes about an hour and includes home-roasting green coffee in pans over a charcoal fire. Dehab says this coffee ceremony is a purposeful way to create fellowship, especially among women:

“You call your neighbors. There is a phrase called buna tetu—you send the children in the room to call your neighbors that the coffee is ready. So everybody in the neighborhood comes. And especially for women, it is a kind of gathering. …They discuss about their kids, they discuss about the husbands, their own problems, maybe. They talk [about] everything. Everything is raised over the coffee ceremony So we can say it is a connection point for the women. They can share their problems, and then they can get advice from their friends. …It’s a very big social event which builds motherhood. That’s how they build the connection within the society.”

When Dehab took the lead at the farm, she saw an opportunity to support and empower the local community, especially women, around her farm. She learned that while that men were generating income by raising bees in hives set up in the forest, women were often excluded from that work.

Collaborating with a local NGO, Dehab developed a comprehensive training program for women in modern beekeeping techniques, ranging from constructing hives to identifying and transferring queens. Dehab then provided graduates with dedicated space on her farm to install hives.

The unique, high-quality honey is a direct product of the farm’s thriving ecosystem. “Since the beehives are located inside the coffee farm, and coffees bloom between February and March, if we harvest in a very calculated way, … it is a monofloral honey,” Dehab explains. “When you open the jars for the honey, it smells like the coffee flower. … We sell it under the name ‘coffee honey,’ and it has a very floral taste.”

Dahab Specialty Farm website: https://dehabcoffee.com

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