Photograph by Ilene Perlman
There are more than 355,000 smallholder coffee farmers in Rwanda, and many of them are organized into cooperatives, such as the one where Mary Mukakamanzi, pictured here, works—the Kobakanya Cooperative, located in the southwest corner of Rwanda. The approximately 300 farmers in the cooperative each have between 500 and 1,500 coffee trees. The fruit from the coffee tree, called a cherry, is picked and brought to a washing station, where workers like Mukakamanzi extract the coffee bean and then ferment the beans in barrels. In 2008, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation provided $47 million to the nonprofit TechnoServe to fund its Coffee Initiative, which helped Kobakanya and other East African cooperatives improve their agricultural practices and business operations.
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