Mwito Site - Lot 310, Nyamasheke District, Rwanda | Natural FSC-9292

Rwanda's coffee story reaches back to the early 1900s, when German missionaries first introduced arabica to the region. It has never been a volume player — Rwanda accounts for only about 0.2% of global arabica — but coffee has long been the country's most important cash crop and a key source of export earnings. Over the past two decades, hundreds of thousands of smallholder plots feeding some 300 wet mills have given Rwanda a reputation for clean, bright, floral cups with a distinctive black-tea character. That's a striking shift from just fifteen years ago, when the bulk of the harvest was washed on the farm and shipped as commodity-grade coffee. Mwito sits in the Western Province, the mountainous belt rising off the shoreline of Lake Kivu. With the lake itself at 1,460m and slopes climbing past 2,000m, the West is Rwanda's traditional heartland — historically its largest producing region — and the high altitude, reliable rainfall, and cool climate make it well suited to growing quality coffee. More background on Rwanda as an origin, and on our work there, is available here: https://falconcoffees.com/rwanda-origin/ Mwito's coffee is delivered through Rwanda Trading Company (RTC), Rwanda's largest coffee exporter, founded in 2009 and built on a focused approach to quality, traceability, and farmer partnership through owned and partner wet mills across the country. More on RTC: https://rwandatc.com/about.php Mwito is the most remote of all RTC's washing stations, and when RTC acquired the mill in 2017, the farmers in the area felt that isolation keenly. Taken by the beauty of the site on the shores of Lake Kivu and by the community's commitment to growing quality coffee, RTC set out to bring investment to the area. It began by gathering a full list of the coffee farmers in the community and grouping them by neighbourhood to make agronomy training easier to reach. In 2019, RTC built a kindergarten for the coffee farmers' children, which now hosts more than 150 boys