Drink good coffee with a good conscience

Please read this and check out the pictures at the bottom.

Our friends the Scallywags in Minneapolis, MN are making a difference. You can help make a difference by drinking Ikawa coffee. Here's the deal. The Scallywags are helping Rwandan coffee farmers build bikes to transport coffee around Rwanda. These bikes are replacing the primitive wooden bikes and old rusty bikes that they have used for years. This helps their efficiency and therefor helps their profit, which puts food on the tables of the farmers. When you buy Ikawa Rwandan coffee you are literally putting money in the pockets of good people in Rwanda who are still recovering from the genocide that took place in 1994.

You can buy Ikawa Coffee online or in our shop.


Here's a blurb from the Ikawa website:

Rwanda is a small country with one of the greatest population densities in Africa. Hundreds of thousands of Rwandans were killed in the Genocide, mostly in a three-month period of 1994. In the time since then, much growth and restoration has taken place. Many Rwandans who fled to neighboring countries in decades past are coming back with their families to make their homes there again. Many of the country’s 9 million citizens are subsistence farmers who work the thousands of hills, and grow a little coffee to boost their meager incomes. In recent years, the introduction of cooperative coffee washing stations has made it possible for many farmers to sell their own specialty coffees at greater prices, directly to micro-roasters. Our roaster, Bull Run, financed the construction of one cooperative’s washing station, and works directly with that cooperative to improve the farmers’ economy.

In 2007, Project Rwanda and other U.S. organizations introduced hundreds of cargo-bearing coffee bicycles to a few Rwandan cooperatives, which allows farmers to get more harvested coffee cherries to the washing stations in much less time, enabling families to get better prices for their coffee. Participants in the coffee bike program are also able to improve their quality of life by using the heavy-duty bicycles to transport other goods, and passengers. The Scallywags Bike Shop has sent several delegations of mechanics to work with Rwandan cooperatives in assembling and maintaining coffee bikes. We use these same coffee bikes in Minneapolis, delivering the same high-quality Rwandan coffee from family-owned cooperatives, and we recycle our profits back into this chain, working towards a more just distribution of wealth – improving the livelihoods of Rwandan farmers.

mmm... delicious Rwandan coffee tastes even better knowing

that you're directly supporting families in Rwanda.

Here's a wooden bike that the

farmers used for transporting coffee.

Here's a new coffee bike that the Scallywags

helped build for Rwandan farmers.