Paper short abstract:

Rwanda has successfully entered into global specialty coffee markets and raised its coffee selling price comfortably above international prices. This was made possible by a transformation of coffee-processing initially driven by the government, but led more and more by the private sector.

Paper long abstract:

Coffee-processing in Rwanda has been transformed from producing exclusively semi-washed, low-quality coffee selling below international prices in the early 2000s into exporting 64% of coffee as fully-washed, of which 75% qualifies as specialty coffee in 2019, resulting in an average mark-up of 0.8 USD/kg over New York C prices in 2018.

While initiation and early adoption of constructing coffee wet mills was driven by the government, donors, and cooperatives, some Rwandan private entrepreneurs did play a substantive role. When the transformation gained speed around 2010, it was largely driven by both international and Rwandan firms. As of 2019, 301 wet mills have been built all over the country. The current phase of professionalization and upgrading is led by the larger companies and include increasing the percentage of exported coffee following various certification standards, raising productivity in wet mills, and operating more ecologically.

This contribution is based on several months of fieldwork in Rwanda in 2019 and 65 semi-structured interviews with government officials responsible for coffee policy, leaders of coffee cooperatives, coffee farmers and all major coffee exporters of whom most are vertically integrated into coffee-processing. While there is still a long way to go until Rwanda can compete with regional coffee powerhouses such as Ethiopia and Kenya, this piece illustrates how the country transformed its coffee-processing and entered global markets of specialty coffee, enabled by a quite effective cooperation between the state and firms, and how business leadership is currently pursuing further accumulation and production transformation.