A displaced Congolese woman stands in her ramshackle shelter during a food aid distribution exercise... [+]
Colin Powell once said that “capital is a coward,” and the data shows that foreign private investment generally waits a decade before re-entering post-conflict countries. Yet the world can’t wait that long. This blog post is about capital becoming more courageous in places like Somalia and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), where economic reconstruction can contribute mightily to the transition to peace and security, even in regions still ravaged by war.
In the DRC, government troops and the M23 rebels are clashing once again as the peace talks in Kampala stall. That’s a tragedy for the millions in the eastern Congo, who for more than 20 years have endured a brutal war that’s left five million dead and several million displaced, and earned the country the infamous title of rape capital of the world.
Yet today a glimmer of hope is emerging from the deeply troubled DRC. It’s just not coming from the peace talks.
It’s coming from the country’s eastern hills. The coffee industry is reviving there, bringing peace, hope and better livelihoods to battle-scarred farmers living in the fertile, highlands of the Lake Kivu region, just across Rwanda’s border.
Decades ago, Lake Kivu was a burgeoning hub of coffee production, but in the aftermath of the 1994 Rwandan genocide and DRC’s own civil war, the industry withered. Individual farmers continued producing, albeit with old and rudimentary equipment and with little access to international markets. To sell their coffee, they had to smuggle their crop across Lake Kivu into Rwanda, traveling at night in small boats and bartering their beans for food and other essentials. One thousand drowned each year, simply trying to eke out a living.
As one coffee farmer, Cecile Batumike, tells it, “I had to bribe the police to be able to cross to Rwanda by boat. I saw boats sink because the waves were huge. Many people in my village died that way, leaving their children orphans and without any kind of assistance.”
In recent years, however, three large co-operative associations, Sopacdi, Muungano and Furaha, formed to provide market access to more than 11,000 coffee farmers in the Kivu provinces. The associations aggregate and sell their members’ beans to specialty coffee markets, including the UK retailer Sainsbury's via Twin Trading, a trading company that was instrumental in helping the farmers develop the capacity to produce premium-quality coffee.
Lake Kivu, Africa, as seen from space. The black line marks the border between Rwanda and the... [+]
That means Congolese farmers no longer need to risk their lives crossing into Rwanda. And even amid the war that surrounds them, they can strive to rebuild their lives.
“With the income from the sale of our coffee, we are now able to send our children to school, we are able to feed our families and we are proud to know that our coffee is being sold in the international market,” reportsCecile Batumike, who is a member of the cooperative association Sopacdi.
Root Capital began financing the coffee cooperatives this year. Our Ugandan-based loan officer, Richard Tugume, who has visited all three enterprises, says he’s noted that coffee farmers are also putting their increased earnings into improving their housing or into investments to diversify their income like livestock rearing.
But, for Richard, the single biggest impact from reviving the Congolese coffee industry is that it is, “demonstrating that people in a country like the DRC, with all its ills and challenges, can still earn a decent living from their honest hard work without getting involved in illegal activities.”
Coffee farming is now viewed as something to strive for, whereas in these communities before, “the role model for wealth and success for rural youth was extortion, or illegal mining, or illegal lumbering of the rainforest” in the resource rich eastern Congo. Now that’s changing.
But lending in the DRC is still not easy. Security is fragile. Roads are in very poor state, and phones, Internet connectivity and electrical supply are unreliable.
Richard, who is experienced working in war zones, is unfazed. (He lived in northern Uganda during some of the darkest days of the Lord’s Resistance Army.) “You get a fear at times that you might be in the wrong place at the wrong time,” he tells me. “But the end objective is way bigger than anything else. It’s one’s passion and compassion of trying to bring these deserving folks into the opportunities arena, despite the madness around them, that gives you drive.”
Late last year, Richard and I took a group of investors and donors to meet with vanilla and coffee clients in southwestern Uganda and the northern corner of Tanzania. We arrived in Uganda shortly after the rebel M23 movement had captured Goma, the eastern DRC’s hub city, and war was raging just hours from where we stood. But as the bullets rained down in the Congo’s green hills, our experience was entirely different.
In peaceful, southwestern Uganda, rural enterprises were burgeoning. They were helping farmers by providing steady income and connections to markets paying premium prices. They were offering internal credit, to help farmers adapt to climate change, pay school fees and start side-businesses to supplement their income. And they were providing technical assistance to enable farmers to grow staple food crops, like red beans and oyster mushrooms, for household consumption.
Today, in the eastern DRC, I see the possibilities for hope as the fledgling coffee industry takes root. It’s a time for courageous capital and capitalism. And one day, when peace finally arrives to the troubled Congo, the promise that those rural enterprises offer for revitalizing regional economies, for bringing peace and hope to farmers, and for offering a productive means for former combatants to contribute to society, can spread throughout the land.
