Burundi

A natural processed red bourbon brings a delicious fruit-forward cup with a toasty and chocolatey body. 

This beautiful coffee hails from the Rama Women's Association, made up of over 120 female producers in the Ngozi region of Burundi. 

Several years ago, Marie-Annonciate began mobilizing other women in her community to band together and gain access to land tenure. In Burundi, women are functionally prohibited from owning land due to patrilineal inheritance laws and the lack of government land codes. While women activists are hard at work advocating change in the government and in legal code, patriarchal customs continue to dominate, especially in rural areas where they exclude most women from owning their land and make female inheritance nearly impossible. 

However, Marie-Annonciate knew that change comes from the people as well as from the government. With support from foundations focused on the betterment of African communities, the women lobbied the government for several years but ultimately could not secure their members’ rights to own land as women.

However, even as one door closed, another door opened, and the story didn’t end there.  Several individuals noticed the Rama group’s determination in their fight for land rights. In the end, a local community member leased their land to the group.

The Rama women’s association produced its first crop in 2017. Before their first crop, they spent two years preparing the land and established a model plantation with healthy trees. Alongside coffee, the member farmers also grow beans, vegetables and potatoes and keep livestock to produce organic fertilizer for the farms. 

Rama members selectively handpick cherry and deliver it to Mubuga washing station, where their cherry follows a strict protocol to maintain traceability through the entire process. Following sorting, cherry is then transported directly to the drying tables where it will dry slowly for 3 to 4 weeks. Cherry is laid out in a single layer. With tedious intention, this coffee is picked through for damaged or defective cherry that may have been missed in previous quality checks.

Once dry, the parchment is bagged and taken to the warehouse. Before shipment, the coffee is milled and hand sorted by a team of hand-pickers who look closely at every single bean to ensure zero defects. It takes a team of two hand-pickers a full day to look over a single bag. 

Burundi has long been overlooked in comparison to its neighboring East African specialty coffee producing powerhouses. However, the country’s coffee is produced almost entirely by smallholder farmers, and much of this small-scale production is of exceptional quality. With its super sweet, clean and often floral coffees, Burundi, every year, is increasingly is putting itself on the specialty coffee map.