Women Rise in Rwanda's Economic Revival

From Survival to Success

Women's Work

Female entrepreneurs in Maraba built thriving coffee farms and other successful businesses as society transformed in the wake of Rwanda's genocide. (Video By Travis Fox -- washingtonpost.com)

For most women here, success in business was the unforeseen byproduct of their fight for survival in the face of unspeakable loss.

In the madness of the genocide, when ethnic hatreds boiled over into mass violence, Jeanette Nyirabaganwa, a minority Tutsi, escaped with her family, fleeing their home in Maraba where her family had cultivated coffee for years. They joined dozens of others who sought refuge in a schoolyard. When Hutu soldiers came, joined by some of her Hutu neighbors, they entered the yard firing machine guns, using machetes to hack those who remained alive. She watched as her husband was killed by bullets, her infant son and 2-year-old daughter hacked to death by blades. She survived by pretending to be dead.

"After two days I woke up," Nyirabaganwa, 39, said. "Birds were eating my dead children. This was too much for me. I wanted to be killed . . . I felt as if I was dead, too. I did not want to go on."

But she did. When the violence passed, and a Tutsi-dominated administration came to power, she returned to the jade hills of Maraba to take charge of four orphaned nephews and nieces. For the first few years, they survived with U.N. assistance. By the late 1990s, she had begun to visit her husband's old coffee plantation and her father's coffee farm, both of which had reverted to her after they died.

The farms were in disrepair, but she began her business by picking a few ripe beans off the trees and selling them to traders in town. "I knew nothing about growing or business," she said. "My job was to pick weeds between the coffee plants; women did not get involved in money or business. It was not done."

Like many women, she joined a coffee cooperative organized with the help of international nonprofit organizations and aid agencies in 1999. By 2001, USAID was offering extensive training to farmers. Rather than emphasize quantity, as farmers had for generations here, a new push was made to improve quality and prices by growing less but better coffee and using fertilizers.

Coffee-washing stations were established to impose strict quality control, sorting beans by grades and disposing of the poorest crops. Tasting laboratories -- staffed largely by women, who scientists say have more taste buds than men -- added to the quality. The best of Café de Maraba's production has become hugely popular among fair-trade coffee distributors in the United States and Europe, with exports growing from 20 tons in 2002 to an estimated 80 tons in 2008.

Theophile Biziyaremye, Café de Maraba executive director, said that male coffee growers in the cooperative have been too set in their ways. "They keep saying, 'We've done it our way all our lives, our fathers and grandfathers have done it this way, so why should I change and use your way to grow coffee now?' " he said. "The women are different. They have not done it before, so they are adapting and growing the better-quality coffee. That also means they are making more money than the men."

Nyirabaganwa is proof. Now employing eight laborers, she is growing three times as much coffee as her father and husband did. They sold their poorer-quality beans for local consumption. Her finer grade is largely for export, roasted overseas and sold in coffee shops and specialty stores in cities including London, New York, Chicago and New Orleans.

"I'm proud of this," Nyirabaganwa said. "I would never have thought I would be in a situation like this. I never thought I could come back."

Her total family income is roughly five times what it was then, income she has used to improve family life. Two years ago, she renovated the family home, still a modest space of plain cement walls, to make it more sturdy. She bought cellular phones for her four charges, all of whom see their aunt as a role model.

"I think that now, boys and girls are different than they were," said Eric Muhire, a junior in high school. "Today, woman are in business; before, if a woman had some money, she would have to give it to the man. They could not compete against a man. But now, they are competing and doing better."

Perhaps more important for Nyirabaganwa, a woman who was only educated through primary school, is that Donatelia Mukampe Ta, 18 and her oldest female charge, is set to graduate from high school this year. Nyirabaganwa has promised to pay for her higher education in the capital, Kigali, where Ta hopes to become an accountant.

By Western standards, women still have a long way to go in Rwanda. Many of the women in Maraba who have husbands are culturally expected to ask their permission before engaging in any form of business. But some of these women who have inherited land from genocide victims have been able to use income from farming or renting that land to gain a measure of financial independence.

When Gemina Mukashyaka, 30, who cleans the coffee-tasting laboratory in Maraba, insisted that she pay for the schooling of her younger sister after their parents were killed in the genocide, her husband balked. She ignored his protests, paying with money she gained from leasing the land she inherited from her parents.

"My husband is not happy about my paying for my sister, but it is my money," she said. "The law in Rwanda now says that woman have that right. I will not let him stop me."