[T]he fourth Let’s Talk Coffee event of 2015, scheduled to take place in Guarapari, Brazil Sept. 10–14, has been indefinitely postponed. Citing lack of in-country support and sponsorship as well as logistical issues, Sustainable Harvest announced that Let’s Talk Coffee will take place in Rwanda in November.
The twelve-year-old “relationship coffee” event was first held in Rwanda last February, in Kayonza, at Women for Women International’s Women’s Opportunity Center. The new event will take place in the country’s capital of Kigali.
With funding from Bloomberg Philanthropies, and in cooperation with the Rwandan Government and the WFWI, Sustainable Harvest launched the Relationship Coffee Institute in Rwanda in 2013. An extension of Sustainable Harvest’s relationship coffee model, the non-profit trains female farmers in Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo in sustainable and profitable agriculture. Those efforts and the work of Rwanda’s National Agricultural Export Development Board—which has made coffee a major focus in recent years—have greatly improved Rwandan coffee. RCI and Sustainable Harvest’s director of business operations, Marcus Young, wrote about a trip to Kigali in Fresh Cup, just after the last LTC Rwanda. Read that here.
A date has yet to be set for LTC Rwanda, but it is slated to be Sustainable Harvest’s largest event in Africa to date.
—Regan is Fresh Cup’s associate editor. Photo of Rwandan coffee farmer by Clay Enos.
