Rwanda’s economy has withstood the economic impact of COVID-19, and in 2020, it was one of the world’s top 10 fastest growing. While it’s worth celebrating, Rwanda’s success doesn’t come without a history of hardship. Many coffee producing countries have experienced adversity in the form of colonialism and the mountainous amount of baggage that comes along with it. It’s rarely discussed when talking about coffee, or often grazed over. I think it’s important for us to know and remember what people across the globe have experienced, and hopefully give us an opportunity to reflect on how we participate and contribute to things that happen in world. When I was reading information about Kivubelt and continued to do research on coffee in Rwanda, parts of its history kept getting mentioned. The history is very complicated, and what I’m sharing here is a summary, if not an oversimplification. I want to share what I learned with you, and I hope you’ll choose to continue reading instead of skipping to the bottom to learn only about the new Rwandan coffee we have just released!
Coffee estates such as Kivubelt are rare in Rwanda, where coffee was originally forced upon small farming communities by the Belgian colonial government in the 1930s. The Belgians controlled the prices for this cash crop, and farmers earned little for their high volume but low grade coffee. At the time, Rwandan coffee was mainly used as filler to higher quality beans used in commercial-grade coffee. With a lack of investment in both infrastructure and the farmers who grew coffee, the Rwandan coffee sector nearly disappeared following the country’s independence in 1962, and continued to struggle through the country’s devastating civil war and tragic genocide in 1994. Women were abhorrently targeted, where rape was used as a weapon for Huti men to gain control over Tutsi women. (To learn more about the conflict and how the US was involved, check out this article written by The Atlantic.)
While the US stood by and failed to provide aid during the conflict, the US provided some assistance in rebuilding the coffee sector after the conflict. Rwandan coffee gained international attention in the 2000s thanks to one of East Africa’s most successful coffee interventions, the Partnership for Enhancing Agriculture in Rwanda Through Linkages (PEARL). Coffee in Rwanda was mainly processed poorly at home by smallholder farmers and was exported with little traceability, and PEARL was created in order to bring infrastructure and education to the coffee sector. Designed and lead by the University of Michigan, Texas A&M and a number of Rwandan organizations, the program increased processing hygiene by building washing stations. It also organized remote smallholders into cooperative businesses. Nearly a decade after the creation of PEARL and subsequent investment in the country’s coffee sector, Rwanda has been able to rebuild while also gaining a reputation for producing coffees with bright, crisp acidity and a sweet, syrupy body.
Rwanda also passed legislation in the early 2000s that would work towards gender equity. Prior to the genocide, women were discriminated against; it was preferred to send sons to school, while women were left to stay at home, tend to the children, and work on the farms that were under their husband’s names. After changes to policies, women were allowed to own property and were given the same rights as men. While women were already largely involved in farming, they could now take up leadership positions in cooperatives, and officially manage farms under their name. Now, approximately 60% of farms in Rwanda are owned by women.
Furaha Umwizey Teuscher was born in Rwanda, and went to university in Switzerland where she received a Master’s degree in economics. She was abroad during the genocide, but Furaha wanted to do something that would contribute to Rwanda’s reconstruction, something that could give job opportunities and lift communities. Rwanda is rich in volcanic soil even in high altitudes, and has a good amount of rainfall. These are good growing conditions for coffee, and she pushed forward with establishing Kivubelt Coffee in 2011. Kivubelt has their own farm—one of the largest in the country—but they also work with over 500 smallholder farmers. They have two washing stations, one of which is located in the Jarama farm.
In the past few years, Furaha has established herself as one of the top producers in the region. Kivubelt pays an incredible amount of attention to detail, and work extremely hard to minimize the potential of potato taste defect by a cherry flotation process, and also plant trees at a distance of 1.5 meters from one other to mitigate diseases from passing onto one another. They cup all the coffee they receive, and record their data to keep track of quality and development. Kivubelt works with the same smallholder farmers year after year, and if they discover any quality issues, they share information with the farmers and work directly with them to reduce issues. Kivubelt also works with an exceptional independent quality control team led by Laetitia Mukandahiro, one of the country’s top coffee quality experts and esteemed cuppers. With their efforts combined, Kivubelt produces some of the most mouthwatering coffees Rwanda has to offer.
We received a handful of coffee samples from Kivubelt, and the one we loved the most was this coffee from the Jarama farm. At first sip, the Rwanda Kivubelt Jarama has notes of honeycrisp apple and melon, and it finishes off with tart but sweet notes, similar to those strawberry bon bon hard candies that are soft and gooey on the inside!
