How Iwan Halim Sahputra Brought Solar Power to Coffee Farmers in Malang

By Alumni UK Team, British Council Indonesia

15 September 2026 - 15:25

Three years ago, Iwan Halim Sahputra visited a group of coffee farmers in Sumberdem, a village in South Malang. There, he saw an opportunity to give more sustainability to the coffee farmers there. The farmers were drying their coffee beans by spreading them across the open ground, exposed to rain, insects, and anything else the weather decided to bring. When harvest time came, they would load up their beans and send them to a neighbouring village just to get the skins removed, because they had no pulping machine of their own.

"They basically had no equipment at all," says Iwan, a lecturer at Petra Christian University in Surabaya and a UK alumnus who completed his master's degree in product design at London Metropolitan University, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Birmingham.

"After harvest, most of them just sold their beans without any processing."

Iwan noted that Indonesia is one of the world's largest coffee producers, yet many of its smallholder farmers remain cut off from the value their crop could generate. Better processing means better quality. Better quality means better prices. But without infrastructure, the gap stays closed.

That visit was the start of an ongoing partnership.

To start, Iwan received the first British Council Alumni Social Action Grant, which helped him to build the foundation: a solar-powered pulping machine and a basic drying facility. That alone was a significant shift. For the first time, the Berkah Tani Nyawiji (BTN) farmer group could process their own harvest on-site.

The second phase, also funded by the British Council, went further. The drying house was expanded to approximately 150% of its original capacity, enabling the group to process between 0.8 and 1.0 tonnes of wet coffee cherries per cycle, enough to handle peak harvest volumes without the bottlenecks that had previously led to post-harvest losses. A coffee sorting machine was introduced, replacing hours of manual labour with consistent, mechanised size grading. Additional solar panels were installed to power the expanded operations, covering the sorting machine, pulping equipment, lighting, and drying house, reducing the group's dependence on grid electricity and the rising cost of fuel.

"If I remember correctly, before they needed like two or three weeks to completely dry their coffee," Iwan says. "After they started to use the solar dome dryer, the drying time was reduced to about one week, so around 50% less than before."

The 26 farmers engaged through the project were trained in the operation of each new piece of equipment. Maintenance training was offered to a smaller group of two or three members with the technical background to carry it forward.

After the second British Council grant, Iwan had the confidence to apply for further funding, and received one from the Australian government. That third round of support added more equipment, pushing the operation still further toward the small-scale processing facility it has now become.

"When we started, I didn't really think we would go this long," Iwan admits. "We didn't even expect to get the first grant. And then it encouraged us to apply again."

The journey has not been without friction. But the farmers are motivated to learn. "Their eagerness to learn, their motivation to improve their welfare, it was very clear. They always contact us when they have a problem. They want to improve themselves."

Iwan traces his ability to design and manage this kind of project back directly to his studies. His master's programme included subjects that shaped how he needs to be innovative in his solutions. However, he mostly credits his time in the UK on helping him to work patiently with people whose backgrounds and experiences are very different from his own.

"In the UK, I met people from different backgrounds, different education levels. It trained me to understand different people and to be more patient," he says. "And that's exactly what you need when you're working with farmers in a village in rural Malang."

A potential new collaboration has also emerged from being a part of the alumni UK network. One of the other British Council grantees, working on a café for people with disabilities, has reached out to Iwan following the programme, and early discussions about future partnership are underway. It is, perhaps, a small illustration of what Iwan sees as the broader value of the alumni network: people doing different things, in different places, who might turn out to need each other.

For now, in Sumberdem, the solar panels are running. The moisture meter is giving farmers real numbers to stand behind. The drying house is processing a tonne of coffee cherries at a time. And a group of farmers who once spread their harvest on the ground and hoped for dry weather are, today, running something that looks a lot like a small factory.