Rwanda

Rwanda’s push into the specialty coffee sector during the first years of this century came in the wake of its 1994 genocide, a gruesome spasm of violence that set neighbor against neighbor and claimed nearly one million lives in a period of one hundred days. When local leaders and international donors began exploring strategies to rebuild the country’s rural economy, they didn’t have to look very hard: Rwanda is known as the land of a thousand hills, and it seemed there was coffee growing on every one of them.

The country’s elegant Bourbon selections and ideal growing conditions helped matters, as did some of the most effective development projects ever implemented in the coffee sector. We were privileged to participate in those projects, and to be present at the creation of the Rwandan specialty sector. We committed to accompany the process every step of the way, to share everything we have learned over the years about quality, and to deliver financial rewards for quality. But Rwanda’s emergence as the source of some of the world’s sweetest and cleanest coffees is mostly the story of the determination and commitment of hundreds of thousands of farmers, and hundreds of quality-focused coffee washing stations, who aligned around a shared commitment to quality in every step of the process.

Shortly after we began working in Rwanda, we met Epiphanie Mukashyaka, a natural leader and entrepreneur from Rwanda’s Southern Province who firmly embraced a quality-first strategy and executed on it like no one else. Over the past 20 years, her family-owned company Bufcoffee has grown steadily, but never lost its focus on quality. Epiphanie passed the torch a few years ago to her son Sam, who is leading the company through a period of continued growth and innovation in the name of quality.

When Bufcoffee builtits first coffee washing station at Remera in 2003, it was the first in the country. Just two years later, it built a second CWS in Nyarusiza, in an area bordering the Nyungwe National Park where the soil is extremely rich and the water supply is plentiful. Since then, it has added two more in Umurage (2017) and Ubume (2019) and a dry mill for exporting. Even as Bufcoffee has added new facilities, it has upgraded old ones —the original CWS at Remera was the site of Sam’s trials with shaded
drying, andtoday home to a tower of stacked shaded drying beds where Bufcoffee slows the drying process to improve the quality and extend the longevity of their coffees.

But Bufcoffee hasn’t just been innovating around coffee. Two years ago, the family set out to do something truly special —reinvest their coffee earnings to create a model kindergarten in Nyarusiza near their second washing station. Today, 168 students are enrolled there, taught by 12 fully accredited, full-time teachers, and fed a nutritious daily lunch in the school cafeteria. Bufcoffee sees the school as a testament to coffee's potential to drive rural development in Rwanda. We couldn't agree more, and are delighted to play a small role in its success through our purchases from Bufcoffee.

Roberto Mata is a giant in Costa Rican coffee. For more than 20 years, he led the team at Coopedota, helping to establish it as one of the most successful smallholder coffee cooperatives in Central America, and one of Intelligentsia’s most reliable Direct Trade partners anywhere in the world. So when he decided in 2017 to go in a different direction, starting a new coffee business with his son, Michael, we went right along with him.

Furaha Umwizeye was born in Rwanda, raised in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and educated in Switzerland, where she studied economics. Like many in the Rwandan diaspora who were raised abroad, Furaha found herself later in life searching for ways to contribute to the country’s ongoing reconstruction. Her studies of international finance and trade had prepared her to lead processes of economic development and market engagement. In 2011, she started Kivubelt, a coffee farming, milling, and export operation in the Western Province of Rwanda on the shores of the breathtaking Lake Kivu.

Kivubelt owns and operates three farms that are large by Rwandan standards —together they comprise more than 90,000 coffee plants in a country where many growers have only a few dozen, or at most a few hundred, in gardens adjacent to their homes. The largest of these is Jarama, which has its own wet mill. But the other two, Kamajumba and Nyaruzina, are utterly unforgettable: both occupy peninsulas that jut out into the picturesque Lake Kivu, and the stretch of land that connects Nyaruzina to the
mainland is so narrow that the farm is accessible only by boat. During harvest, the Kivubelt coffee boat delivers freshly harvested cherry to the shore near the town of Mugonero, where it is relayed by truck to Kivubelt’s other washing station at Murundo.

In the rolling hills that surround the Murundo CWS are hundreds of smallholder growers collaborating with Kivubelt on a project they call People’s Farm —a collective quality and marketing effort that has been the source of some of the most exciting coffees we have sourced from Rwanda in recent years. In 2018, a People’s Farm lot placed third in the Rwanda Cup of Excellence competition.