COOPACVOD, Matador

Matador is home to a coffee cooperative called COOPACVOD that has been helping local coffee farmers create a sustainable livelihood for the past 37 years. in 1976, a group of 33 young farmers formed a cooperative called the Coffee Farmers Cooperative of Vincent Oge of Dondon (COOPACVOD in its French acronym), with the goal of trying to create a better livelihood for for the coffee farmers of their community. They believed that the exporters who were coming to buy the coffee beans were exploiting the farmers, and so they decided that a cooperative was the best way to protect the farmers. 

For the past 33 years, the cooperative has been buying the raw coffee beans from the farmers directly, processing them, and selling them both to local and international markets, and transforming their local economy. They have been so successful that other exporters have tried to undermine the cooperative, but they have carried on. The revenue that COOPACVOD generates is invested back to treating the coffee and the coffee tree nursery which produces over 1,000 saplings a year; the rest all gets separated into a bonus for the members of the cooperative.

COOPACVOD has over 700 members, including 2 of the original founders. They have generated enough revenues over the years to capture a local spring and put it into a water tower, both for the processing of coffee and for the local population. They built a a new coffee processing factory with an organization called CRUDEM.