COFFEE FOR PALESTINE
£5 DONATED PER 250G BAG
£10 DONATED PER 1KG BAG
Supporting Islamic Relief's Palestine Emergency Appeal. Donations transferred monthly, with totals published publicly.
Turi Kumwe – Kinyarwanda for “We Are Together.”
A name that reflects both our solidarity with Palestine and the three Rwandan coffee-growing communities behind this lot.
Produced by our direct trade partner Emmanuel Rusatira of Baho Coffee, this honey-processed coffee brings together smallholder contributions from the Ngoma, Akagera and Bugoyi washing stations.
Islamic Relief
Since we sold the last bag of our previous coffee in support of Palestine in July 2024, approximately 37,000 additional Palestinian deaths have been recorded in Gaza alone. Thousands more have been injured, many permanently disabled, and countless families displaced. In the occupied West Bank, hundreds more Palestinians have been killed, while escalating settler violence and forced displacement continue to devastate communities.
Let there be no confusion, this is still genocide happening in real time.
As a coffee roaster, our place in the conversation around this issue may not at first seem obvious. And at times, sure, we've been asked to "stick to coffee" and leave politics out of it. For us that's not an option, and this isn't a matter of politics. This is a matter of human rights, and quite frankly, an affront to the principles of equality, dignity and mutual prosperity that underpin the entire argument for speciality coffee.
If we don't care about Palestinians, why should anyone believe we care about the other communities we profess to support?
As we approach 2027, it's difficult to comprehend that we've been watching this unfold for years, not months. What once dominated headlines has become an almost routine feature of the news cycle, and the danger of that normalisation is impossible to ignore. For those of us who care, it's important to keep talking about Palestine. For those of us with a platform, it's even more important to use it.
After careful consideration, we’ve opted to collaborate with Islamic Relief for this year's charity coffee release. This is a global organisation with a long-established humanitarian presence in the occupied Palestinian territories. Their continued work throughout this crisis has provided vital aid through food distribution, orphan sponsorship, medical and mental health assistance, maternal healthcare, and displacement support; their established partnerships with organisations such as the World Food Programme have helped continue their support throughout periods of restricted access.
Donations will be calculated from sales, transferred to Islamic Relief’s Palestine Emergency Appeal monthly, and the totals published publicly.
Last time we ran this campaign, we raised and donated £2,850.
Emmanuel Rusatira & Baho
We’ve been working in direct trade partnership with Emmanuel since 2020.
Emmanuel Rusatira, founder and CEO of Baho Coffee, has spent over two decades working in Rwanda's coffee industry. Starting as a washing station manager, he went on to establish Baho Coffee, which now operates multiple washing stations across Rwanda and works with thousands of smallholder farmers.
Under Emmanuel's leadership, Baho has become known for its innovative processing methods. Honey, natural and experimental processes are continually refined to maximise quality and increase value for the contributing communities. Alongside improving coffee quality, Baho supports local growers through free seedlings, agricultural training, health insurance initiatives and access to speciality markets.
The Lot
Harvested in May–June, this honey-processed regional lot showcases the exceptional sweetness achievable from Rwandan community coffees. Its selection and honey processing, achieve a softer acidity and intense sweetness more commonly associated with Central American coffees.
Turi Kumwe brings together coffee from three Baho washing stations, representing approximately 6,000–6,500 smallholder farmers across western Rwanda:
- Bugoyi - Rutsiro District, managed by Jean Damascene Ntibiramira.
- Akagera - Nyamasheke District, managed by Aphrodice Gahonzire.
- Ngoma - Nyamasheke District, managed by Claude.
Like most Rwandan coffee growers, these farmers cultivate small, mixed-use plots, with coffee providing an important but often precarious source of income. Government-regulated cherry prices offer some stability, but leave limited room for increasing earnings.
Baho's model of premium payments, quality incentives and long-term purchasing relationships helps improve farmer returns, while investment in processing allows these smallholder contributions to reach higher-value speciality markets.
Interestingly, this particular lot consists entirely of smaller screen 13/14 beans, which typically command lower prices despite having no inherent disadvantage in cup quality. That means we've secured an exceptionally tasty coffee at a great price, while still paying above the market-rate.
Processing
- Ripe cherries are handpicked, sorted and floated to remove defects.
- Cherries are depulped, leaving mucilage attached to the parchment.
- Parchment is shade-dried for 2–3 days without turning, encouraging uneven fermentation and greater complexity.
- Coffee is transferred to raised beds and slowly dried for up to 40 days, reaching 10–12% moisture.
- Dried parchment is transported to Kigali for hulling, grading and export.
Rwanda
Rwanda's experience of genocide is distinct from the ongoing atrocities in Palestine, with its own history and political context. We're not attempting to equate the two. The name Turi Kumwe is simply an expression of solidarity and togetherness.
Rwanda is often presented as a kind of development success story - clean streets, steady growth, a government that appears to function in ways a lot of its neighbours don’t. That stability, largely shaped under strongman autocrat Paul Kagame, has been built through a highly centralised model that prioritises control and long-term planning over political openness. It’s effective, depending on how you measure it, but it also sits within a region that remains volatile. Across the porous border in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, armed groups like M23 continue to operate with Kagame’s support. Following the Rwandan genocide in 1994, many genocidaires fled Rwanda and contributed to ongoing instability in the DRC and Burundi. On the one hand Rwanda has shown the world what recovery can look like on a national scale, on the other hand its brutal history and hunger for justice have the potential to perpetuate instability in the wider region.
Coffee plays a specific role within that broader picture. Rwanda doesn’t have large estates or industrial-scale agriculture; instead, production is almost entirely in the hands of smallholders, each working tiny plots of land. That fragmentation could easily lead to inefficiency, but it’s been organised into a national system built around washing stations, pricing structures, and export channels. In practical terms, that means coffee becomes one of the few reliable ways for rural households to generate cash income - not enough on its own, but often critical for things like school fees, healthcare, and basic stability.
That’s where its potential for change sits. Coffee isn’t transforming Rwanda overnight, and it doesn’t resolve the deeper political or economic tensions, but it does create a consistent flow of value into rural areas where alternatives are limited. Companies like Baho Coffee operate within that system, and while they’re still part of a global supply chain with all its imbalances, the model - premiums, long-term purchasing, investment in infrastructure - can shift things incrementally in the right direction. It’s not a silver bullet, but in a country where small changes compound quickly, that kind of structure matters.
