Procurement with purpose – meet the businesses making a difference
SAP Australia has recently announced a new corporate initiative called 5 & 5 by ‘25, targeting five per cent of its addressable procurement spend with social enterprises and five per cent with diverse businesses by 2025. The initiative aims to inspire organisations around the world to buy more goods and services from purposeful suppliers, making a positive collective impact on society.
Here, we look at one the Australian social enterprises that will benefit from the pledge.
Kua – World Positive Coffee for Workplaces
In mid-2017, two UNSW students found themselves in rural Uganda. Inspired by the energy and passion of the local people, they founded Kua, a world-positive coffee company in Sydney.
With a mission to have a greater handprint than footprint, Kua sources specialty coffee direct from the misty slopes of Mount Elgon, East Africa’s oldest extinct volcano. They pay the fairest prices on the mountain to farming families who handpick the reddest (and best) coffee cherries.
Every dollar of profit from sales in Australia goes back into the farming community helping them on their journey to climate resilience through native tree planting, designing waterways that improve soil conservation, and providing sustainable incomes through carbon offsetting activities.
Kua also recycles coffee grounds in the belief that your brew shouldn’t end up in landfill, where it would create harmful carbon emissions. Instead, those grounds are given a second life in community gardens and reuse projects across Sydney.
Kua has already made more than 240,000 square kilometres of Ugandan land resilient to climate change, and removed more than 2,300 kilograms of used coffee grounds from landfill. It’s a brilliant example of the circular economy in action that aligns perfectly with SAP’s commitment to eliminating single-use plastics.
“Our coffee allows businesses to embed impact into their every day. Each cup fights climate change, diverts waste from landfill and enhances farmer wellbeing. SAP’s pledge is a positive step towards helping social enterprises like us make an even greater impact.”
Darcy Small, Kua, Co-Founder
