Rwanda's Coffee Success Must Deliver More Value to Farmers, Says Industry Expert
For generations, Rwandans were encouraged to grow coffee, protect the trees and leave the cup to others. The crop was cultivated for export, but much of the value created through roasting, branding and consumption was realised elsewhere.
For Arthur Karuletwa, that history is personal. Having lost members of his extended family during the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi, he says he developed what he describes as a personal vendetta against coffee, not because of its taste, but because of what it had come to represent.
Over time, however, coffee became something else: a way to help Rwanda reclaim economic value, restore dignity and strengthen its place in the global market.
Today, Rwandan coffee is recognised internationally, with the country earning nearly $150 million from exports in 2025. Yet Karuletwa believes recognition alone is not enough. The next challenge is ensuring that the farmers whose work makes the industry possible benefit more directly from its growth.
"Recognition is a door. It doesn't pay school fees by itself," he says.
Karuletwa is Vice President of Sustainable Sourcing and Impact at Chobani and La Colombe, an American coffee roaster and retailer headquartered in Philadelphia and a pioneer in agricultural supply chain traceability. His career has taken him from Rwanda's early efforts to develop a specialty coffee industry to 12 years working on global coffee traceability at Starbucks.
His central argument is that Rwanda must move beyond producing exceptional coffee to securing greater ownership of the value it creates.
Reclaiming the cup
Karuletwa's journey into coffee began with a contradiction. While Rwanda's farmers cultivated the crop for export, they had limited opportunities to participate in the more lucrative stages of its journey.
"Grow coffee. Protect the tree. Leave the cup alone," he says, describing the message that effectively defined the colonial relationship with the crop.
The result, in his view, was a system in which the people producing coffee were largely excluded from the wealth and experiences associated with consuming it.
In the early 2000s, Rwanda began moving beyond commodity coffee towards the specialty market, where quality could command greater value.
In 2000, the country had just two coffee washing stations. Within a few years, their number had grown into the hundreds. In 2008, Rwanda became the first African country to host the Cup of Excellence competition.
Karuletwa returned home after leaving as a teenager on a basketball scholarship to the United States. He worked as a consultant to OCIR-Café, now the National Agricultural Export Development Board (NAEB), and the Ministry of Agriculture, later serving as a strategic adviser to the Office of the President and the ministry.
Together with partners, he helped establish Inzozi Coffee Traders to train farmers in quality and connect them to international markets. He also contributed to Rwanda's coffee branding efforts and the expansion of its washing-station network to more than 200 facilities.
He subsequently joined the founding team of Rwanda Trading Company as Vice President of Coffee Procurement. Building dry-milling capacity, he says, was another step towards retaining more value within the country.
In 2007, he helped open Bourbon Coffee in Kigali, which he describes as Rwanda's first specialty coffee shop and retail roastery. Its mission was to put a cup of Rwandan coffee in every Rwandan's hand.
The idea went beyond opening cafés. It was about encouraging domestic consumption, introducing Rwandans to the quality of their own coffee and demonstrating that local businesses could roast, serve and market it to international standards.
For Karuletwa, the experience reinforced a wider lesson: producing something exceptional creates an opportunity, but ownership determines how much of that opportunity translates into lasting prosperity.
Who captures the value?
Rwanda exported 23,860 tonnes of coffee in 2025, earning nearly $150 million, according to figures cited by Karuletwa. The earnings were comparable to a much smaller volume of business in earlier years, reflecting the growing value of the country's coffee.
But he argues that the next phase of the industry's development must focus on how that value is distributed.
"The washing station is the first and most important point at which a farmer's work is assigned an economic value," he says.
It is where coffee cherries are weighed, graded and priced, making it a critical point in determining the returns farmers receive. Yet Karuletwa estimates that fewer than half of Rwanda's washing stations are owned by farmers, while the five largest exporters handle more than 80 per cent of exports.
He is careful not to suggest that private businesses are responsible for the sector's structural challenges. Exporters have brought investment, market access and quality systems that helped the industry grow. Having worked across different parts of the supply chain, he believes the question is whether the existing structure gives farmers sufficient participation in the value they help create.
"When the farmer sells cherries, she sells her coffee at its lowest value. Every step after that, where value multiplies, belongs to someone else," he says.
One solution would be to expand cooperative ownership, joint ventures and shared-equity arrangements that allow farmers to hold stakes in the washing stations they supply.
He also advocates transparent cherry prices, grading systems and follow-up payments that farmers can verify, alongside financing and management support to help farmer organisations run competitive businesses.
Productivity is another priority. With Rwanda's limited land, Karuletwa believes the sector should focus less on planting more trees and more on increasing the value produced by each tree through better agronomy, healthier soils, improved plant nutrition and the rejuvenation of ageing farms.
The measure of progress, he says, should ultimately be the additional income farmers earn, rather than simply the volume they harvest.
Making every farmer visible
Traceability is central to Karuletwa's approach. His interest began with an experience as a student in the United States, when he forgot his student identification card and was stopped at a cafeteria entrance while his teammates went inside.
He had to return to retrieve the card before he could enter. The incident made him reflect on how a simple document could establish identity and provide access to a system.
For coffee farmers, he says, there is often no equivalent. Their work can be celebrated internationally while their individual contributions disappear once the coffee enters the supply chain.
"To me, traceability is about giving her that card back," he says, referring to a woman farmer whose coffee may travel far beyond the community where she grew it.
During his 12 years at Starbucks, Karuletwa worked to advance coffee traceability across producing countries. At La Colombe, he continues to focus on systems that connect products to the people and places behind them.
Traceability can help record transactions, improve payment transparency, strengthen quality assurance and provide financial institutions with better information about farmers' production and sales. Such records could help farmers demonstrate their economic activity and potentially improve access to credit.
It also matters in specialty coffee, where a product's identity and quality help distinguish one harvest from another. If buyers can trace coffee to its source and assess its quality consistently, farmers have a stronger basis for building lasting relationships with them.
For Karuletwa, traceability is therefore both an economic and a moral imperative. The people who create value should not disappear from the story of the product.
Keeping more value at home
Rwanda's opportunity, he argues, is to participate more fully in the stages that follow production, including dry milling, grading, export, roasting, branding and retail.
This does not mean the country must perform every stage domestically or turn away from international partners. Rather, it should develop the capabilities that allow more income, expertise and employment to remain in Rwanda.
Bourbon Coffee was an early expression of that ambition. It sought to show that Rwandans could do more than grow coffee for export: they could also build businesses around it and develop a domestic coffee culture.
Karuletwa identifies four priorities: encouraging local consumption, strengthening Rwanda's competitive advantage through quality and traceability, building Rwandan brands that can compete internationally, and connecting coffee with tourism.
Visitors who come for Rwanda's landscapes, wildlife and hospitality could also discover its coffee through farm visits, cafés, agrotourism, conferences and sporting events.
The aim is to build on Rwanda's distinctive growing conditions and reputation rather than compete with larger producers on volume alone.
He also wants international buyers to move beyond short-term transactions towards relationships that support farmers through changing market conditions. These could include multi-year purchasing agreements, pricing informed by production costs, investment in farm productivity and arrangements that reduce farmers' exposure to volatile commodity markets.
At La Colombe, he says, this philosophy includes what he calls "our shadow on the soil": the commitment to show up, listen and understand the realities facing the people who grow the coffee.
Karuletwa maintains that Rwanda must take primary responsibility for its agricultural future, while international buyers can contribute through transparent pricing, long-term commitments and shared investment.
"We must never confuse partnership with dependency," he says. "Rwanda must be the architect of its own prosperity."
Securing the next generation
The challenges facing coffee farmers remain substantial. Karuletwa points to ageing trees, small and fragmented plots, limited access to finance, volatile markets, climate change and uncertainty over whether younger generations will remain in farming.
Finance, he argues, must reflect the realities of coffee production. Farmers need capital before flowering and liquidity during harvest. Replacing ageing trees also requires patient financing because new trees may take three to four years to become productive.
Climate resilience is equally important. Regenerative agriculture, agroforestry, biodiversity and shade-grown systems can help protect soils, buffer climatic extremes and support the long-term health of coffee farms.
But these interventions will have limited impact if farming remains an unattractive livelihood for young people.
"Young Rwandans are ambitious, educated, and increasingly connected to the world," he says. "They will not remain in coffee simply because their parents did."
They must see coffee farming as a profession offering dignity, profitability, innovation and a future worth pursuing.
Karuletwa also identifies research and development as a strategic priority. Rwanda's dependence on the Bourbon lineage, he argues, exposes the sector to risks associated with disease and changing climatic conditions.
He points to Colombia's experience with coffee leaf rust as a warning of how a disease can threaten an industry.
He calls for dedicated coffee research to breed, evaluate and develop varieties suited to Rwanda's different elevations, soils and climates. The objective should not only be to improve yields and disease resistance, but also to preserve and expand the distinctive flavours that give Rwandan coffee its competitive edge.
A future built on what makes Rwanda different
Looking ahead five to ten years, Karuletwa is cautious about prescribing national priorities without full knowledge of the sector's institutional challenges. But he believes Rwanda already possesses significant advantages in its microclimates, elevations, soils, coffee heritage and people.
He often describes coffee as the product of three elements: variety, terroir and processing, with the farmer as the conductor. Each contributes to the final cup, but it is the farmer's knowledge and decisions that bring them together.
For him, productivity, finance, traceability, environmental protection and generational renewal should not be treated as separate ambitions. They are interconnected investments in the people and land on which the industry depends.
Ultimately, Rwanda's success should be measured by more than the attention its coffee receives abroad. It should also be measured by whether Rwandans can grow it, understand it, enjoy it, build businesses around it and earn a fair return from it.
Karuletwa's ambition reaches back to the message that shaped his early understanding of coffee. Rwandans were once told to grow the crop and leave the cup to others. The next chapter, he believes, must ensure that the cup and the value it creates belong to them, too.
Read the original article on New Times.