Karongi: KOPAKAKI DUTEGURE gains a partner to promote coffee farming

Young people in Karongi District are being encouraged to engage in coffee farming, leveraging their energy and strength, to ensure consistent supply to consumers and promote economic development—particularly for youth and women.

Karongi District is one of the major coffee-growing areas in Rwanda, especially in sectors near Lake Kivu. However, despite the favorable conditions, coffee farming in the area is largely dominated by older individuals, with minimal youth participation—not only in coffee farming but in agriculture more broadly.

To address this, the Kibuye Coffee Farmers Cooperative (KOPAKAKI DUTEGURE), located in Rubengera Sector, has launched a campaign to mobilize young people to take up coffee farming. Of the cooperative’s 1,264 members, only 81 are youth.

The cooperative’s Manager, Bahati Thierry, expressed concern over the low youth participation. He stated:

Not only in coffee farming, but even in other types of agriculture, we see that youth are not engaging. We want to put effort into changing this so that more young people become coffee farmers. We will achieve this by using success stories from youth who are already farming coffee and benefiting from it. Some of them started with just a few coffee trees and now have many, significantly improving their livelihoods through coffee income.”

KOPAKAKI DUTEGURE recently secured a partnership with Pact Coffee, an international buyer, which will help promote coffee farming, especially among youth and women.

“The lack of buyers had been demotivating farmers, causing some to stop maintaining or planting coffee. We had gone two years without a buyer,” Bahati added.

“Now, this buyer has already purchased three containers from us and plans to continue. They will also support training programs for youth and women on the benefits and returns of coffee farming.”

Nshimyimana Papias, a 20-year-old member of KOPAKAKI DUTEGURE, is a testament to the benefits of youth engagement in coffee farming.
He said in an interview with The Source Post:

“I started growing coffee at age 15 after seeing how it helped improve the life of a neighbor. I began with just a few trees, but now I have 400 trees. My goal is to reach 900 trees next year, and I’ve already bought my own plot for planting, which cost me 500,000 RWF. I previously used land from my parents, but now I own my own.

“I encourage fellow youth to get their hands out of their pockets and into the soil—coffee farming really pays off.”

“In the last season, I harvested 100 kg, which gave me enough money to buy the land and still have some left for other needs,”

he added.

However, Nshimyimana also highlighted some challenges coffee farmers face:

“We would like the price of fertilizer to be reduced. Right now, it costs 924 RWF per kg, which is very high. If it could be brought down to around 500 RWF, it would help us a lot.”

Mr. Willy, the buyer from Pact Coffee, said working with youth and women is of great value:

This aligns with our principles of promoting gender equality and inclusiveness.
The problem is that if youth don’t get involved in coffee farming now, in the near future there will be a shortage of coffee on the global market, as most of today’s farmers are elderly. We chose to work with KOPAKAKI DUTEGURE because we saw they had already started involving youth and women. We are confident that more youth will join in the future, and we will continue buying from them in greater volumes.”

“We chose to buy Rwandan coffee because it tastes better and has a richer aroma compared to other countries,” he concluded.