Coffee connoisseurs say a good brew can be life-changing. This Bond alumnus set out to prove it.
Since 2019, Nice Coffee Co, the company Jim Chapman founded while still a student at Bond University, has helped lift dozens of Kenyan families out of poverty.
Profits from every kilo of Nice Coffee go towards providing scholarships and support to educate kids from Africa’s largest slum, Kibera, just outside Nairobi. Targeting large companies, along with individual coffee fanatics, enabled Jim to grow the fledgling business he started as a university assignment into a successful social enterprise.
“We’re funding around 14 full-time teachers' salaries through the coffee and around 32 kids from the slum on scholarships to some of Kenya’s best high schools,” Jim says.
“If a company goes through 4kg of coffee a week, that might equate to four students being able to go to high school, and high school is proven to lift people out of poverty.”
In true entrepreneurial fashion, six months ago he handed the company over to his local partners, ensuring they were set up for ongoing success.
“It’s great to have this agreement where the company continues to run, serving the same clients and the donations still come back to the school projects,” he said. “So, I’m happy that what I started at uni will continue to have an impact for hopefully many years to come.
"We’ve also got the foundation that we set up to formalise the work. So now on top of the coffee we’re getting donors from Australia, a lot of friends, family, uni mates, companies are jumping on board supporting our work, which is really nice.”
Jim launching Nice Coffee Co in 2019.
Jim launching Nice Coffee Co in 2019.
The power of social enterprise hit home for Jim when he took part in Bond’s Transformer Program – an Australian-first entrepreneurship program available free to all students.
“I can pinpoint the day – we had this guest speaker at Transformer who was a well-known social entrepreneur from West Africa and I remember hearing him talk about how business can deliver social impact. It sent me into a deep dive on the issue. I remember going straight to the uni library and taking out as many books as I could on social enterprise and just became a bit obsessed with the concept.”
Jim’s latest venture is running safari tours from his family’s Ololo Safari Lodge on the edge of Nairobi National Park. Despite growing up in Northern NSW, the family regularly visited Kenya and in what Jim calls his dad’s ‘mid-life crisis’, bought a block of land there.
They developed the lodge, with Jim and one of his brothers later establishing the safari tours. A third brother owns a farm nearby, which supplies all the food for the family and Ololo guests. With the new venture continuing to grow, he’s now looking for ways to invigorate an industry he says has changed little over the years.
“The safari industry is quite traditional,” he said. “It’s only recently we’ve started to see changes and the embrace of new technology."
"We’re always adding new regions and areas to our tours, and that is enough of a challenge, but I’m also exploring new technology and how we can use it enable guests to get more involved in the whole process. Again, that comes out of my experience at Bond where we were exposed to people who were doing crazy things in tech and it was so inspiring.”
And Jim feels like he is in just the right place.
“Down the track, it would be fun to get into the tech scene here, which is big,” he said.
“There is actually a lot of talent here in Nairobi, they call it the Silicon Savannah. There’s some smart people here for sure and I’d love to get more involved.”
Published on Wednesday 26 March 2025.
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