Rwanda’s Coffee Co-ops

If you could design the ideal place to grow coffee, what would it look like? Rolling green hills, coffee plants growing wildly, rich soil, a predictable and consistent rainy season? Sounds a lot like Rwanda. But ideal coffee isn’t just in the plants; it’s in the people too. They need the knowledge and the ability to sustain positive growth, the resources to educate the youth, the freedom to build their community in the way they see fit. Good coffee can’t exist without being harvested by people in a healthy community. That’s why Green Mountain’s new Spring Revival Blend, the result of a partnership between Green Mountain Coffee, the Cordes Foundation, and TransFair USA, is a Fair Trade coffee that blends top of the line beans with building the sustainability of coffee cooperatives in Rwanda.

The two cooperatives that supply beans for this blend are KOAKAKA and Abakundakawa, cooperatives from very different regions but with strikingly similar stories. KOAKAKA is located in south central Rwanda, about three hours from the capital of Kigali, and is comprised of 1640 members, 365 of whom are women who were widowed during the civil war. Though started just six years ago, they already have a matriculation rate of 90 percent of children (compared to 40 percent nationwide), universal health care, and they’ve built roads in order to get their coffee into the global marketplace...

[Continue reading this article at the Fair Trade Certified Blog]