Kigali, Rwanda - Arthur Karuletwa really needs a cup of coffee.  He flags down a server in one of his own Kigali, Rwanda coffee shops and makes sure the woman next to us is also being served.  His phone never stops ringing, and it seems like his mind never stops racing.  Luckily, he has plenty of his own coffee to keep him going.  And, as the founder of Bourbon Coffee, Rwanda's first international coffee brand, he's poised to bring his addiction to the rest of the world.  The first stops are Washington D.C. and Boston.

Karuletwa plans to open two Bourbon Coffee shops on the East Coast this summer, and as even he admits, this isn't particularly newsworthy.  "There's like four coffee shops a day that open in the U.S. and three of them fail," he said. 

But, "I think what we're doing in Boston and D.C., we're not opening a coffee shop, we're establishing a brand."  And this brand has big potential, not just for Karuletwa, but for combating poverty in his home country of Rwanda.

A mere 14 years after being torn apart by civil war and a genocide that claimed 800,000 lives in 100 days, the small landlocked East African country of Rwanda has managed to rebound on an exceptional scale.  A stable government has fought hard to attract international investors and make the country a safe and hospitable place for locals and expats.  But, that doesn't mean that most of the Rwanda's inhabitants don't still toil in poverty, earning less than $300 a year. 

There is little to be mined there, compared to ore rich neighbors like the Democratic Republic of Congo.  Many Rwandans farm hilly patchwork fields, tending small plots of corn or banana trees.  The country has only the fertility of its soil and the resilience of its people as national resources.  But, according to Karuletwa, both of those resources have the ability to raise Rwanda up on an international level through the coffee market.

"It's a product that ends up on one of every two people's kitchen counters," he said.  "Its ability to be a necessity in the market, and its volume of trade being second to oil, is just phenomenal."  But, "even more phenomenal, sadly, was its lack of impact on the people who grew it.  They look nothing like people who produce oil.  That really intrigued me." 

Karuletwa is more than familiar with both coffee and the problems Rwandans face.  Forced to flee to the U.S. during the 1994 genocide, he completed school on a basketball scholarship and then went to work for a coffee classification company in Seattle that took beans from around the world and distributed them to specialty buyers. 

It was a coffee crash course, and demonstrated what sets some coffees apart from others in terms of quality.  After that, Karuletwa continued to climb the American corporate ladder and went to work for Proctor and Gamble's Millstone Coffee division, but memories of his homeland haunted him.  

"The need to understand what happened when everything slowed down, how it happened, and most importantly for me, the need to make sure that it never happens again" was strong.

"Through my intimate understanding of the genocide, I came to a clear affirmation that the Hutus and Tutsis did what they did, the colonialists did what they did, but the core issue that was continuously being overlooked was the issue of poverty," he said.  "If someone was given 5000 francs to hack his neighbor he's known all his life and do it without a flinch, that says something about poverty, and the lack of understanding of having nothing to lose, but very little to gain."

Inspired by a 2003 speech the President of Rwanda gave in Boston asking for the internationally scattered minds of the Rwandan people to refocus on their country, Karuletwa decided to return and use his skills in coffee to help. 

As a consultant for the Ministry of Agriculture, he worked with village famers to institute quality controls and implement new cultivation techniques to improve the coffee's value in the international commodities market.  Farmers were trained in how to negotiate with buyers and command top dollar for their high quality product.  "Justify why you want a higher price and you'll get it," he instructed.  "You have to demand what you deserve."

As this improved product entered the market, behemoths like Costco and Starbucks came courting.  This could be considered a coup for a country like Rwanda, but Karuletwa had more in mind.  As a new member of the Rwandan Coffee Board, he used his influence and experience to convince officials that Rwandan coffee was capable of bigger and better things than simply servicing Starbucks.

"Starbucks was interested, but partnering with them was risky because it would be under their brand, not Rwanda's," he said.  "They have a big mermaid that takes up a lot of space before they show the origin, let alone the community, let alone the co-operative…We would end up on the fine print."

Karuletwa was convinced that the high quality of Rwanda coffee could sustain its own brand if just given the chance, but in order to crack the specialty coffee market, it would take more than just a Rwandan coffee label.  To that end, Rwanda's coffee cultivators were divided into five regions, each one distinct in terms of landscape, people, culture and coffee flavor.

In order to market Rwandan coffee and command top prices, "we needed to start focusing on branding Rwandan coffee in an amazing way.  We needed to stop competing with the coffee industry and start competing with the wine industry" in terms of specialization. 

Small scale farmers with as few as 150 trees were brought into co-operatives, and combining their growing efforts had big implications for the country.  Karuletwa estimates that there are a half million coffee farmers in Rwanda.  If you add in their families and communities, about a third of Rwanda's population is directly affected by the coffee trade.  Working together can bring in bigger profits and ensure greater sustainable growth.

Realizing he now had a first rate product but no adequate platform to launch it, Karuletwa opened a coffee shop in the capital of Kigali and called the endeavor Bourbon Coffee after Rwanda's pure botanical strain of Arabica tree.  The first Bourbon café was such a smashing success that another location soon followed.  Offering a wide array of their staple coffee, as well as food and Wi-Fi (an unusual commodity in Rwanda), both Bourbons are filled with locals and expats all day, every day. 

Bourbon had successfully elevated Rwandan coffee within its own borders, but Karuletwa felt the time was now right to bring it, and Rwanda, to the international level.  The American Bourbon coffee shops will highlight not only the coffee of Rwanda, but the people, culture, crafts, food and tourism of the country as well.

Each location will have touch television screens that allow customers to navigate through Rwanda using Google Earth, and learn about each region and its people.  They will be able to watch video testimonials from Rwandan farmers, snack on African food, and purchase Rwandan crafts that benefit local charities. 

"Coffee can be a portal.  It's the first door to the world that opens a vast amount of information to people," he said.  "They want to see, feel, experience; and this will do it for them…This will give people a doorway to Africa."

But, most importantly to Karuletwa, and to his potential new consumers, is the ability to see how each coffee purchase directly impacts the Rwandan farmer.  Using a bar code tracking system, consumers will be able to scan their coffee package and see exactly how much money was paid to the farmer from the purchase.  It is a level of transparency in the fair trade market that Karuletwa feels has yet to be reached, and its time is long overdue.

Meghan Hedley, a Californian living in Kigali, is a big Bourbon fan and can see the venture succeeding in the States.  "People who may never actually travel to Africa, I feel would enjoy the fact that they're contributing through this," she explained.  "This would be a good way for people to be of aid to someplace that they would never tangibly be able to, and see how fair trade specifically helps."

To Karuletwa, "what's most dear to me is increasing value and restoring the reputation of the farmer.  The farmers are perceived as peasants, bottom of the barrel of a class of people.  Yet they are the backbone of our economy." 

The solution may just be in the bottom of a coffee barrel.  "We want people to understand 'Here's a country that's developing itself from ashes, but has developed a business that is a good business.  It's making a clear impact," he said.

"You can't eradicate poverty in my lifetime, but you can dent poverty significantly," he exclaimed optimistically.  But first he has to respond to the countless phone calls and endless demands of running a multi-national business.  "As long as I maintain my sanity," he said grinning.  "Maybe with some more of this," gesturing to his coffee cup.

- Originally reported November, 2008