Private-led coffee sector governance through InterCafe, and its dismantling
Burundi had run its coffee value chain through a public regulator, ARFIC, beside private-led bodies: InterCafe, whose members were producers, millers, roasters and exporters, and the growers' consortium CNAC with about 109,000 members. The government named all three as joint implementing agencies of the Coffee Sector Competitiveness Project. In January 2020 it replaced them by decree with ODECA, an office under state control. The project closed early in 2021, and 44 percent of the grant was cancelled.
44 % of grant funding, share of the ida coffee sector competitiveness grant cancelled after the government returned the coffee sector to state control, 2021. 109,000 members, individual members of cnac, the national coffee growers' consortium, one of the three private-led implementing bodies, project appraisal (c. 2016). World Bank, Implementation Completion and Results Report ICR00004849, Burundi Coffee Sector Competitiveness Project (P151869), March 2022, retrieved 2026-10-02.
The move, and what it needed
Over two decades the Government of Burundi handed coffee sector governance to an independent public regulator alongside a private interprofessional association and a growers' consortium, and wrote them into a donor project as co-implementers. In January 2020 it took the value chain back by presidential decree under a new state office, without consulting the partners.
Preconditions
- Private and cooperative operators organised enough to run washing stations, sector data and an interprofessional body
- A state willing to share control of the main export crop, a commitment that here rested on donor conditionality more than on domestic consensus
- Legal footing that can survive a change of government, which a decree-based arrangement did not have
Limits: The only source is the lender's own completion report, and it is written from the side that lost the argument: the World Bank calls the 2020 decision unilateral and made without advance warning. The 44 percent is the share of one donor project cancelled. It measures what the dismantling cost that project, not how much public-private delivery Burundi lost. The ICR publishes no series on the scale of the private-led arrangement, such as the private share of washing stations, InterCafe's budget or the volumes it governed. The 109,000 CNAC members is a membership count at appraisal, not a delivery figure. The liberalisation began under structural adjustment in the 1980s and was pushed by donors (IFC advised on the third phase), so how far the arrangement was Burundi's own institutional choice is contestable. The 2005 start year rests on a decree the ICR names as the one that reformed the sector. The ICR does not say in which year InterCafe itself was created. Nothing here shows whether coffee output, quality or grower prices fell after ODECA took over. The ICR reports the share of AA/A/FW+ grade coffee rising from 59 to 66 percent, 70 percent of the incremental target. No data exists for the second quality indicator, the specialty share of exports, because ARFIC was removed and ODECA provided none.