Sara Yirga Takes Ethiopian Coffee Expertise on the Road to Nairobi

For decades, specialty coffee education followed a familiar path: expertise flowed from consuming countries — the United States, Europe, Australia — back to the farms and processing stations where coffee originates. Trainers flew in, conducted workshops, and flew home. The knowledge transfer was real, but so was its direction.

Sara Yirga is rewriting that script.

In February 2026, the Ethiopian coffee professional conducted her first regional training outside her home country, teaching an SCA Intermediate Roasting Skills course at Utake Coffee’s training campus in Nairobi, Kenya. The three-day session, held at Bluebells Gardens in Syokimau from February 17-19, marked a quiet milestone: an origin-country expert delivering world-class specialty coffee education to a neighboring origin country.

Who Is Sara Yirga?

The credentials are serious. Yirga holds Q-Grader certification, Q-Instructor status, and SCA Authorized Specialty Trainer credentials. She became an AST in 2018 — the first in Ethiopia — and has since trained more than 170 individuals plus numerous companies and their staff.

But credentials only tell part of the story. Yirga runs YA Coffee Roasters, a women-owned and women-run artisan roastery and export company she founded in 2012 in Addis Ababa. She also operates Cherish Addis Coffee & Books, a specialty coffee shop in the Ethiopian capital. And she serves as President of the Ethiopia Chapter of the International Women’s Coffee Alliance.

This isn’t someone who stumbled into coffee education. This is someone who built it from the ground up in a country where specialty coffee culture had to be invented rather than imported.

The Nairobi Training

The intermediate-level roasting course was organized by Mbula Musau and hosted by Utake Coffee, an SCA Premier Training Campus. The curriculum covered roast development, heat transfer, first crack timing, and the variables that separate good roasting from exceptional roasting.

What made the event notable wasn’t the syllabus. It was the geography. Ethiopia and Kenya share a border and a deep coffee heritage, yet professional exchange between the two countries’ specialty coffee sectors has been limited. Having an Ethiopian trainer deliver SCA-certified education in Kenya represents a new model — one where origin countries teach each other rather than waiting for expertise to arrive from overseas.

Why This Matters

Coffee-producing countries have long exported their best beans while importing their coffee knowledge. The trainers, the certifications, the cupping protocols — these traditionally came from importing nations. The implicit message: we grow it, they understand it.

Yirga’s work challenges that assumption. Ethiopia is where Coffea arabica originated. The country’s heirloom varieties, forest coffee traditions, and coffee ceremony culture represent millennia of accumulated knowledge. An Ethiopian coffee professional shouldn’t need to fly to Europe or North America to learn how to teach roasting. And coffee professionals in Kenya shouldn’t need to wait for Western trainers when expertise exists next door.

The SCA’s global training network makes this kind of cross-border collaboration possible. By certifying origin-based trainers like Yirga, the system enables knowledge to flow in new directions — south to south, origin to origin, rather than always north to south.

Building Infrastructure at Home

Yirga’s regional ambitions build on a decade of work inside Ethiopia. YA Coffee Roasters started as a small operation in 2012 and grew into an export-focused roastery that ships directly to international buyers. The women-owned model isn’t incidental. In a country where women dominate coffee harvesting but remain underrepresented in processing, roasting, and export, a women-run roastery makes a statement.

Cherish Addis Coffee & Books, her Addis Ababa cafe, brings specialty coffee culture to local consumers — a segment that’s growing as Ethiopia’s urban middle class expands. For a long time, Ethiopian specialty coffee left the country while locals drank commercial-grade blends. Yirga is helping change that equation.

What Comes Next

The Nairobi training was described as Yirga’s “first regional training outside Ethiopia.” That phrasing suggests more will follow. East Africa’s coffee sector includes Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda, Burundi, and the Democratic Republic of Congo — all producing countries, all potential destinations for an origin-based training model.

The IWCA’s network provides infrastructure for this kind of expansion. As president of the Ethiopia chapter, Yirga has direct lines to women in coffee across Africa and beyond. The February event in Nairobi was small — one course, one campus, one week. But it demonstrated what’s possible when origin-country expertise starts circulating on its own terms.

Specialty coffee has spent years talking about “giving back” to producing countries. Yirga’s work suggests a different framing: producing countries have expertise to share with each other. The knowledge was there all along. It just needed the credentials and the platform to travel.