Take an aerial tour through the evergreen mountains, tea fields and villages of Fort Portal and Bundibugyo districts in western Uganda. You won’t get a better view of the area without chartering a helicopter. I shot this with my drone in between assignments in Zambia and Georgia last month while on a road trip to visit friends.
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If you could get a caffeine rush from walking through tea fields I’d be bouncing off walls by now. But as I’ve learned recently from shooting for Shared Interest in Uganda’s tea-growing highlands, there’s a lot involved in getting those glossy green leaves into a palatable consistency. Shared Interest, an ethical investment company out of the UK, loans exclusively to fair trade buyer and producer organizations around the globe. Hit play below (and turn on the HD!) to find out what Shared Interest is doing in this corner of Africa.
Read MoreNext time you take a sip of the world’s most popular beverage, think of the hands that harvested it from a hill far away. Many that work on tea plantations around the world are children forced into labor or adults earning deplorable wages. Not so, however, in the fields of Mpanga Tea Growers Factory outside Fort Portal, Uganda. Mpanga is different from the dozens of other growers in the country because it grows Fair Trade tea and is solely owned by small holder farmers. One of my recent clients, Shared Interest, is a UK-based ethical investment cooperative that provided $250,000 worth of capital to Mpanga in the form of a loan. This allowed the Fair Trade growers to expand their business and land on which they farm. Shared Interest is the world’s only 100% fair trade lender. The land surrounding the factory is host to clean, modern schools, health care[…]
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