We are excited to welcome a new farming community to EthicHub!
We are thrilled to announce that La Soledad has decided to join our platform and get access to a new form of financing with cheaper and more accessible rates, and the opportunity to sell its coffee under better conditions.
More and more farmers are deciding to become part of our growing ecosystem. With the incorporation of La Soledad, EthicHub now comprises 7 communities, mainly small Mexican coffee producers. The communities of Las Delicias, San Rafael, La Boquilla, Chespal, Chanjalé and Guatimoc were already part of our project. We celebrate each member and welcome the La Soledad community to EthicHub.
La Soledad aligns with our principles perfectly and their decision to join EthicHub further emphasizes what we are trying to achieve with their help: to create an ecosystem in which all stakeholders benefit through mutual cooperation.
Like the rest of the communities, La Soledad was created by hard-working people with profitable but unbanked activities. It is this obstacle that makes it virtually impossible for them to break the cycle of poverty and attain social and economic development.
Despite hard work and a profitable venture, the La Soledad group is located in a remote area where the few roads that exist are practically untraversable. It is the most obvious example of what the Inter-American Development Bank calls “the last mile”: isolated or hard-to-reach individuals who are unable to access traditional financial or banking services. It is a huge success for the BID to be able to finance this “last mile” at rates of around 50%. With EthicHub, these communities will access loans with interest rates of less than 25%.
The wonderful optimization that we achieve using blockchain technology is what attracted the attention of the BID. Due to our way of rethinking new business models and the obvious impact that we are having on all of them, the BIDLab has become our reference investor in the seed round that we closed at the beginning of the year.
The first project for which the funding was requested was to build a commercial bridge between them and us, joining the coffee route that we are opening between Chiapas and Europe. La Soledad will send us its excellent coffee, becoming one of the first producers to use our MarketPlace P2P.
Our mission is to connect buyers with farmers who participate on the EthicHub platform and to achieve this it is necessary to send coffee to Europe and make a statement about the exceptional quality of the coffee and prepare ground for future Agreements Contract Agriculture (where buyers commit to purchase orders)
We enable buyers to have access to new opportunities on a market that until now was limited to large importers, with a differentiated quality product; farmers can finally get a more significant share of what the end consumer pays for their coffee.
It takes several months before the farmers receive their payment for the exported coffee and that is why the producers of the La Soledad Group apply for the loan, equivalent to the value of the coffee they are selling. The loan will be subsequently covered with the sales from the coffee. Once the coffee has been sold and the interest depreciated, the costs incurred in the export process will be deducted and the capital gains will be split equally between EthicHub and the farmers.
It is a win-win scenario for everyone involved!
Connecting people. Harvesting wealth.
