Rwanda FT-FLO Dukunde Kawa

The Dukunde Kawa cooperative is Royal’s oldest Rwanda supplier and a rare source of certified coffee from this origin. The coffee, like the coop itself, is uniquely well-managed and consistent. It is without a doubt among the best and brightest cooperative coffees we drink all year.  

Rwanda’s coffee production has evolved a lot in the last 10 years. There are more exporters, there’s better traceability, and more diversity in cup profiles as microregions, estates, and natural processing are now on the market. For those of us still in love with the origin’s fully washed profiles, however, with their fresh picked herbs and raw honey complexity, nothing can compare.   

Dukunde Kawa Cooperative   

Dukunde Kawa is a well-known producer group in Rwanda, as much for exceptionally bright and memorable coffees as for its exceptional business structure: the cooperative carries multiple certifications for its various washing stations including Fair Trade, Organic, Rainforest Alliance, and UTZ, and more than 80% of its workforce is women. Not only that but the organization is located in the Northern province, which, despite its closeness to Kigali, tends to be little-known in specialty coffee compared to the west and south.   

Since first organizing in 2000 with a single wet mill, years before the majority of washing stations in Rwanda even existed, Dukunde Kawa has received sustainability awards from the SCA as well as placing in the top positions in Rwanda’s Cup of Excellence competition. Today the cooperative has over 2,000 farmer members and multiple washing stations in the Gakenke District north of Kigali. 

Rwanda’s Unique (and recent) Coffee History 

Despite its diminutive size compared to other East Africa coffee producing countries, Rwanda’s coffee has an important history and terroir entirely unique to the rest of the continent. Coffee was originally forced upon remote communities by the Belgians as a colony-funding cash crop. The Belgians distributed varieties cultivated by the French on Ile de Bourbon (now Reunion Island, near Madagascar) but had so little invested in coffee’s success that they immediately allowed production to decline through lack of investment in national infrastructure, as well as the farmers who grew it. As a result, the sector suffered near total obscurity in the coffee world from Rwanda’s independence in 1962 until the period of rebuilding following the country’s devastating civil war and astonishingly tragic genocide in 1994.  

Rwanda’s former cash crop, however, came back to international buyer attention in the late 2000’s thanks to one of East Africa’s most successful coffee interventions in history. This project, founded by USAID, was titled the Partnership for Enhancing Agriculture in Rwanda Through Linkages (PEARL).   

PEARL was a sweeping infrastructure and education plan that targeted large regions of Rwanda whose coffee was for the most part processed poorly at home and exported with little traceability. The program, designed and led by Michigan State University, Texas A&M University, and a host of Rwandan organizations, vastly increased processing hygiene by building washing stations. It also organized remote and under-resourced smallholders into cooperative businesses capable of specialty partnerships.   

Perhaps most significantly for the long term, PEARL took the legacy bourbon genetics buried in abandon and polished them anew to the amazement of coffee drinkers everywhere. The snappy acidity, stone fruit flavors, and fragrant herbaceousness found in Rwanda’s coffee is still completely unique to bourbon produced anywhere else in the entire world. Producer groups like Dukunde Kawa cherish their farmers’ potential and are learning to maximize the quality and variety available from Rwanda’s most promising terroirs.