United States Department of State (Washington, DC)
Jim Fisher-Thompson, Washington File Correspondent
26 May 2006
Kigali — Production of high quality coffee in Rwanda will soon get a jolt of technology as an innovative program to connect coffee-washing stations to the Internet takes effect.
The connectivity initiative is supported by a grant of $250,000 from the development fund of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). The funding is a small part of the $10 million the agency has spent in the past five years to help boost one of Rwanda's major exports.
The project seeks to make it easier for coffee producers to access timely information about global coffee prices while exploring export opportunities. Maraba Coffee was the first specialty coffee produced in Rwanda for the export market and is the flagship for new USAID Internet connectivity project.
After months of installing high-speed Internet access lines at coffee-production sites, the first station will soon be open. The lines were installed by U.S.-based firm Terracom, which recently bought a majority interest in Rwanda's state telecommunications giant Rwandatel as part of the Rwandan government's privatization efforts. (See related article.)
Rwanda, which lacked the capital to expand the state firm, saw the sale as an important way to harness the private sector to shift the country to a more knowledge-based economy, much as Mauritius has done with capital from India.
Terracom, which has more than 350 kilometers of fiber-optic cable in Rwanda, also is donating mobile phones and high-speed wireless data cards to the Maraba Coffee/USAID partnership. The data cards employ the same technology that is used in the United States to deliver wireless high-speed Internet access to laptops.
In February, U.S. Ambassador Michael Arrieti hosted a delegation from the Specialty Coffee Association of America to Rwanda. The association is the chief representative of the $20 billion coffee industry in America.
Boosting Rwanda's coffee industry, which employs thousands of growers and workers, already is having exponential effects, a USAID document notes. "The results of this increase in incomes are evident in coffee-farming communities -- children are going to school, homes are being repaired, farmers are covered by health schemes and people are working together for the common good of the community."
(The Washington File is a product of the Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://usinfo.state.gov)
Be the first to Write a Comment!
Copyright © 2006 United States Department of State. All rights reserved. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com). To contact the copyright holder directly for corrections — or for permission to republish or make other authorized use of this material, click here.
AllAfrica aggregates and indexes content from over 125 African news organizations, plus more than 200 other sources, who are responsible for their own reporting and views. Articles and commentaries that identify allAfrica.com as the publisher are produced or commissioned by AllAfrica.
