The Musasa Dukunde Kawa cooperative has four washing stations lying high in Rwanda’s rugged northwest. Nkara – the cooperative’s third washing station - was built by the co-op in 2007 with profits earned from their first two washing stations, Ruli & Mblima and a bank loan. The washing station lies at 1,800 metres above sea level and serves farmers within the Ruli Sector of Rwanda’s Northern Province.
Much of the success of Musasa Dukunde Kawa can be attributed to the transformational PEARL programme of which it was a part. The project switched the focus in the Rwandan coffee sector from an historic emphasis on quantity to one of quality, thus opening Rwanda up to the much more highly valued specialty coffee market. The programme and its successor, SPREAD, have been invaluable in helping Rwanda’s small-scale coffee farmers to rebuild their production in the wake of the devastating 1994 genocide and the 1990s world coffee crash.
Most of the small-scale producers with whom Musasa Dukunde Kawa works own less than a quarter of a
hectare of land, where they cultivate an average of only 250 - 300 coffee trees each as well as other
subsistence food crops such as maize and beans. The cooperative gives these small farmers the chance to
combine their harvests and process cherries centrally. Before the proliferation of washing stations such as
Nkara, the norm in Rwanda was for small farmers to sell semi-processed cherries on to a middleman, and
the market was dominated by a single exporter. This commodity-focused system - coupled with declining
world prices in the 1990s - brought severe hardship to farmers, some of whom abandoned coffee entirely.
Today, it’s a different picture. Farmers who work with Musasa Dukunde Kawa have seen their income at
least double, and the co-op produces some outstanding lots for the specialty market year after year.
‘Musasa’ means ‘a place to make a bed’ and ‘Dukunde Kawa’ means ‘let’s love coffee’ in Kinyarwanda -
a reference to the power of coffee to improve the lives of those in rural communities.
