NORTHERN PROVINCE

MUSASA — Up to 105 coffee farmers in Musasa, Gakenke district, Wednesday received coffee bikes on credit to help them transport their coffee to washing stations.

The bikes meant to help farmers improve the quality of their coffee, was an arrangement of Sustaining Partnerships to Enhance Rural Enterprise and Agribusiness Development (SPREAD), a USAID agribusiness project. It will help them transport their coffee cherries to washing stations on time.

The Chinese-made bikes loaned to farmers of Dukunde kawa Cooperative were channelled through Vision Finance Company (VFC), a microfinance bank.

Siméon Ngendahayo, in charge of the bikes programme at Spread, noted that taking coffee beans to coffee washing stations on time avoids fermentation of flesh coffee which badly affects coffee beans.

"We want to improve coffee quality, and for sure those bikes will help,” he said, adding  that the difference can already be seen in Huye district in the Southern Province where similar bicycles were distributed last year.

"They coffee bikes eased the farmers’ burdens and yielded better results,” he said.

The bicycles were invented by Tom Ritchey- the man who invented Mountain Bikes in the US- are said to be special compared to ordinary bikes found in Rwanda.

Ngendahayo said they are stronger, faster, and can carry a load of up to 250 kilogrammes at a time. They have eight different gears to help roll on different terrains.

These attributes seem to impress Balthazar Kamali, a coffee farmer who is one of the beneficiaries. With 2,000 coffee trees on his plantation, he said he has been hiring many bikes to take his coffee to Musasa washing station.

"I am very happy,” he said after receiving his bicycle.

Farmers are required to arrive at washing stations with cherries at 3:00 pm everyday to avoid avoids under pulp fermentation because they don’t spend another day unwashed. Another farmer said the newly-acquired machines will help to portray the value of coffee to others.

Beatrice Kayitesi, who started growing coffee at a tender age and recently left her teaching job to concentrate on coffee farming, didn’t own a bicycle before.

"It is fabulous. I am going to show this bike to other farmers and they will see the importance of growing coffee,” she said. For Musasa farmers to qualify for the bikes, they had to acquire VFC’s loans.

Kayitesi paid half of the bike’s price (Frw 96,000). This year alone, VFC plans to invest $140,000 (about Frw 75,320,000) into the Rwandan coffee industry through coffee bike leasing.

"If farmers pay well, we will triple that amount,” the VFC Managing Director, Scott Bellows, said. The bank plans to lease up to four hundred coffee bikes to coffee farmers in Gakenke district alone.

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