Rwanda's miracle coffee beans
Visit Christian Science Monitor for a thoughtful profile of a Rwandan coffee cooperative that bridges the Hutu-Tutsi divide. Cooperatives like it are helping absorb the tens of thousands of prisoners being freed after serving time for acts of genocide, while contributing to Rwanda's 7% annual growth in GDP.
Partnership to Enhance Agriculture in Rwanda through Linkages (PEARL), which helped get the cooperative off the ground, claims that 85% of the coffee profits go to farmers. If you're in the UK, you can buy coffee from this particular cooperative online or look for Maraba Bourbon Coffee at Sainsbury's.
I love this story, because the Rwandans are competing on product quality and taking advantage of online media for brand awareness. PEARL is also quite clever at marketing, as you can see from Maraba Coffee's extensive Wikipedia entry. Score one point for fair trade.
The CSM piece is part of a series (with slideshows) on Paths to Forgiveness in African countries recovering from war. See a previous post for another Rwandan coffee article.
Comments (3)
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This is a truly inspiring story, though I can't begin to imagine how this woman gets through her day.
I wanted to share a similar story about a women's weaving collective in Bosnia.
Bosfam is a group of women survivors of the 1995 Srebrenica massacre. It was founded during the refugee crisis and has since expanded to include Bosnian Muslim, Croat, and Serb women.
Bosfam helps these women, all of whom have been damaged by the war, by offering them an opportunity to work in an environment where they can draw comfort from each other and satisfy their need to work. Women socialize and work together – regardless of age, religion, ethnic background, or education – to make some really incredible traditional rugs. The sale of these items is the only source of income for many of them.
We would call it psychosocial therapy, ethnic reconciliation, sustainable livelihood generation and a dozen other technical things, but the reality is much more human and much more inspiring than the words we throw around to describe it. For a few of the weavers, the center has literally saved their lives when they thought that the grief and loneliness had become unbearable. It’s an amazing story.
Bosfam is a long-time partner of the Advocacy Project (I’ve had the privilege of getting to know the director). We work with them to help generate support for their work. Most recently, we launched a Sponsor a Weaver project to help build the apprenticeship program started by Bosfam to preserve the traditional craft of weaving and support their important work.
If anyone out there is interested in learning more about Bosfam, please see our website:
http://www.advocacynet.org/cpage_view/WeaversBosfam_bosfampage1_52_220.html. For information on the Sponsor a Weaver program, see:
http://www.advocacynet.org/cpage_view/WeaversBosfam_SponserAWeaver_52_456.html
Posted by: Stacy | Oct 25, 2006 2:13:26 PM
What I find fascinating, is that the Rwandan government has made it illegal to define people as Hutu or Tutsi. I would therefore imagine that a project that "bridges the Hutu-Tutsi divide" must be a little tricky in Rwanda. But perhaps this aspect of the project is simply not publicised here.
From Rwanda,
Maurice Pigaht
Posted by: Maurice Pigaht | Oct 31, 2006 5:09:15 AM
Rawandan coffee? No mention of how it tastes? Is it like Ethiopian? OK, that's another can of worms! My local cafe (TLC Coffee Roasters) does not carry it, but they have the Ethiopian Yergecheffe, a dry processed bean.
Posted by: Bill | Sep 2, 2009 4:10:54 PM