News and Updates
Coffee entrepreneur Andrew Rugasira on empowering women farmers in Uganda
How do we ensure that opening up new markets helps to build up the economies of the developing world? And what role should women play in it? Bridget Kendall is joined by Sherry Coutu, a seasoned angel investor from Canada; leading Ugandan coffee entrepreneur Andrew Rugasira; and Oxford University anthropologist Catherine Dolan who studies the intersection of business and poverty. Read More
 
Don't Help me, Trust me Your African Coffee Producer

At a recent speech at DRI, Andrew Rugasira described what happened as Good African Coffee, the business he founded in Uganda’s Rwenzori mountains, began to take off. As farmers began to produce higher quality coffee and see higher prices for their crops:

Something really extraordinary began to happen.  The values that we don’t really hear about in a lot of these development reports began to manifest: entrepreneurship, business exposure, dignity, esteem, the pride in producing a product that they knew was going into a market…Read More
 
Can Coffee Kick-Start an Economy?
When he set out to wedge his coffee onto supermarket shelves in England and America, Andrew Rugasira didn’t start by making phone calls from his home in Kampala, Uganda. He didn’t begin by sending e-mails. The distance seemed too great for that. At one end of his business were farmers who, until he came along, thought their beans were purchased and carried off to make gunpowder.

 At the other were buyers at the corporate headquarters of chains like Waitrose and Sainsbury’s, Whole Foods and Wal-Mart. If he was going to succeed, he felt he would have to do it physically; it was as if he believed he could stretch himself to span the divide between the two worlds. So he got on a plane to London, without trying any advance contact.Read More
 
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