Humure Fully Washed Scr 15 RA

Humure washing station sits in Gatsibo, Eastern Province, at 1,624 meters above sea level. The station is the largest in the Baho Coffee family, collecting cherries from 1,500 smallholder farmers, employing over 200 people during peak season and producing significant volumes of green coffee annually. Newly constructed in 2017 and acquired by Baho Coffee in 2018, it has grown quickly into one of the most important stations in the region. Humure takes its name from the highest hill in the area, a local landmark and tourist destination that functions, as Baho Coffee Managing Director Rusatira Emmanuel puts it, like a flag for the area.  

Farmers supplying Humure hold small coffee plots, averaging around 250 trees, most intercropped with food crops like maize and potatoes. Despite their modest size, coffee remains the primary cash crop and main source of income for most of these households. Humure station supports its 1,500 supplying farmers in a range of ways: providing year-long small loans to help cover production costs, medical bills and school fees; distributing seedlings to help renew aging rootstock; supplying safety equipment for chemical application; and organizing Farmer Field Schools where groups of 20 to 30 farmers learn soil conservation, water protection and waste management from a trained lead farmer. The station also facilitates access to government-supplied inputs, transporting them from warehouses to the local area so farmers can reach them more easily. 

This lot is Rainforest Alliance Certified. Coffees bearing this mark have been grown using practices that preserve the environment while simultaneously helping farmers reach wider markets and gain higher prices for their coffee. 

Ripe cherries are selectively picked and delivered to Humure station, where they are sorted on tables to remove physically defective material including unripe, overripe and damaged cherries. They are then floated to separate high-density quality cherries from lighter defects. Sorted cherries then undergo a first fermentation of 8 hours. After this, they are depulped into a concrete fermentation tank and left to ferment another 12 hours in order to fully break down the mucilage and develop complex flavors. After fermentation, the parchment is washed, graded and transferred to raised drying beds for 26 days of sun-drying, spread evenly and turned regularly to ensure uniform moisture reduction and prevent defects. 

Rusatira Emmanuel is the founder and owner of Baho Coffee. Rusatira established Baho Coffee in 2013 after a long career in coffee that began as a washing station manager and culminated in a position as head of a department, managing a number of stations. Today, Baho Coffee oversees four washing stations across Rwanda. With one station in each of the coffee producing provinces, Baho Coffee has access to a wide range of profiles and processing methods.  

In addition to providing a number of educational, financial and agricultural services to farmers, Baho Coffee also has several social programs that are geared towards helping farmers, especially marginalized groups like women, older farmers and youth.  

Rusatira, who was personally affected by the Rwandan genocide that took place in 1994, focuses on helping women because he understands firsthand that many families lost many male members during the genocide. As a consequence, Rusatira explains, many Rwandan families are headed by women. Single motherhood—whether caused by the genocide, lack of access to family planning or other circumstances—is often lonely and isolated. Rusatira’s intention is to bring typically isolated single mothers together and ease that isolation while also providing support and training to help them improve their circumstances. 

 Rusatira’s plan is to process and sell the coffee from women-led families separately. A key part of this plan is to include not only a wide range of information on the lives and conditions of the women in the group but also to include a letter, written by the women in the group, detailing how their station and their customers can help them overcome specific challenges in their lives.  

In addition to his program to help single mothers, Rusatira is also focusing on helping older farmers continue to feel relevant and to support young farmers in establishing and improving their farms. He is confident that Baho Coffee’s impact will continue to grow year after year. “As a small company we’re on a small scale,” he said. “But I keep extending.”