Attention Coffee Roasters,
here's how you can
Get Involved
Yes, they really do transport cherries on bikes made of wood!
Imagine what it takes to push a 50 pound wooden bike with a load of 300 pounds of coffee cherries 5 to 10 kilometers to the washing station? It takes a determination born out of suffering.
Project Rwanda, as a non-profit organization, is able to present a unique opportunity to coffee roasters to help support Rwandan Cooperative farmers through its Wooden Bike Coffee program. We are offering premium AA green Rwandan coffee at the price which we paid, $2.00/lb, as well as labels for your coffee bags. We are requesting a $1.00/lb tax-deductible donation written to Project Rwanda to help further Project Rwanda’s efforts of making high load/high quality bikes available to the country’s coffee farmers.
Promoting Rwandan coffees through growers, importers, roasters and retailers and getting it into the hands of conscientious coffee lovers takes our cooperative effort. Your participation in this partnership will help reconstruct a country through the spirit of economic stability and success, and will serve as a model with the potential to impact farmers worldwide.
New humanitarian efforts arose from the efforts of concerned people and roasters like you to aid Rwanda’s recovery from a countrywide genocide in 1994. This horrifying event killed nearly a million people and destroyed the economy, including the coffee export business, Rwanda’s largest export crop. Over the past several years, these humanitarian efforts have helped Rwandan farmers with the construction of centralized washing stations and cupping facilities which have enabled them to produce coffees that have earned a remarkable reputation for quality in a short amount of time. However, one of the last great challenges facing the farmers is transporting the cherries from their plantations to the central washing stations before fermentation degrades the crop.
Creating a bicycle solution to this problem has been one focus of Project Rwanda. The “Coffee Bike” was designed with distribution assistance through Project Rwanda and was engineered specifically for transporting heavy loads of coffee, thus enabling farmers to transport their own crops and ensuring that their labor earns its full reward. Because the quality of the crop is directly related to the time it takes to transport the cherry to the mill, it is a great advantage for the farmers to own their own transportation.
You have a unique opportunity to spread the great news of the successes in this small African nation with beans, brochures, labels and web connections to people who want to contribute to the progress in Rwanda.
Thank you for participating and making a difference in this important undertaking.
