The remotest of the remote
In the far northeastern corner of Burundi, tucked into the rolling volcanic hills of Muyinga Province, there's a community of coffee farmers who turned isolation into an advantage. The Hafi Cooperative is made up of around 2,000 smallholder producers, many of them women, growing heirloom Bourbon at altitude on some of the most fertile – and most remote – land in the country.
Getting to Hafi isn't straightforward. From Bujumbura, Burundi's largest city, it's a six-hour drive on roads that become impassable when the rains come. For years, the farmers here faced an even bigger logistical challenge: the nearest wet mill – where freshly picked coffee cherries are depulped and washed – was over a day's journey away. Too far to haul perishable fruit and still expect quality at the other end.
The name Hafi means “near” in Kirundi, the national language. It was chosen by the farmers themselves – a quiet statement of aspiration for the processing infrastructure they didn't yet have close to home. That name stuck, and it now represents one of the most exciting natural coffee programmes in East Africa.
Innovation born from necessity
Without access to a washing station, the Hafi farmers couldn't produce washed coffee – the processing method used for the vast majority of Burundian exports. Most coffee in Burundi follows a two-stage fermentation approach similar to Kenya: depulped, dry fermented, soaked in mountain water, then dried on raised beds. It's the standard, and it works well. But it requires equipment the Hafi community simply didn't have.
So they adapted. They began drying their coffee whole on raised African beds – the natural process – and over time developed their own anaerobic fermentation techniques, sealing cherries in low-oxygen conditions for controlled periods before drying. What started as a workaround became a genuine craft. The controlled fermentation amplifies sweetness, deepens fruit character, and adds layers of complexity that have caught the attention of speciality roasters around the world.
It's one of those stories where constraint drove creativity. The Hafi farmers didn't choose natural processing because it was fashionable – they chose it because it was possible. And then they got exceptionally good at it.
Burundi: small country, big coffee
Burundi is one of the smallest nations on the African continent – roughly the size of Wales – but coffee is its lifeblood. The crop accounts for the majority of the country's exports, and over 800,000 smallholder families depend on it for their livelihood. That's a significant proportion of a population where around 90% are farmers.
Coffee was introduced to Burundi in the 1930s under Belgian colonial rule. Farmers were given seedlings and expected to cultivate them with minimal support. After independence in 1962, the coffee sector was privatised, then nationalised a decade later, then slowly privatised again from the early 2000s. A devastating civil war in the 1990s and early 2000s decimated production. Through all of this, farmers kept tending their trees.
The country's growing conditions are genuinely exceptional. Altitudes range from 1,200 to nearly 2,000 metres, volcanic soils are rich in nutrients, and rainfall is generous – around 1,200mm per year. The main coffee-growing regions are Kayanza, Ngozi, and Muyinga in the north and northeast, each producing coffees with distinct character. Kayanza is known for bright, citric acidity. Ngozi for balanced sweetness. Muyinga – where Hafi sits – for fruit-forward intensity and a chocolatey depth that sets it apart.
Jeanine Niyonzima-Aroian and JNP Coffee
The Hafi Cooperative's coffee reaches the global market through JNP Coffee, an exporting company founded in 2012 by Jeanine Niyonzima-Aroian. Jeanine's story is deeply personal and deeply tied to the land.
She grew up in Bujumbura, where her mother told stories of the family cultivating coffee in Ngozi Province to pay for school fees. It was coffee that funded education, and education that eventually took Jeanine to the United States, where she earned an MBA from Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management and built a 20-year career in international business and telecommunications.
But Burundi never left her. In 2008, she founded Burundi Friends International, a non-profit focused on education and economic empowerment for rural communities. Working with women coffee farmers through that organisation, she kept hearing the same request: could she help them sell their coffee? It was at a Cup of Excellence competition that the penny dropped. Jeanine tasted what Burundian speciality coffee could be – exceptional, complex, completely unknown to most of the world – and realised she had every reason to lead the business herself.
JNP Coffee was born. Today, Jeanine is a licensed Q Grader and certified Q Processor, she sits on the SCA Board of Directors, and JNP works with over 18,000 farmers across multiple provinces. She is, by any measure, one of the most influential figures in Burundian coffee – and a powerful advocate for the country's producers on the global stage.
The Dushimé® programme
At the heart of JNP's model is a programme called Dushimé® – Kirundi for “let's be thankful.” The concept is elegantly simple and genuinely impactful.
After each harvest is sold to roasters and buyers around the world, JNP returns to the farming communities with a second payment. This isn't charity – it's a quality premium, typically between 20 and 40 cents per pound, that reflects the price the coffee actually achieved on the global market. It's a direct link between what a roaster in London or Los Angeles pays and what the farmer in Muyinga receives.
To date, Dushimé disbursements have passed the half-million-dollar mark. More than 10,000 women and their families have benefited. The programme also funds financial literacy education and leadership training, building skills that extend well beyond the harvest. JNP established the Burundi chapter of the International Women's Coffee Alliance (IWCA), which now has over 2,000 members, each of whose coffee is marketed for traceability and impact.
When Jeanine visits to distribute the second payment, the farmers dance and sing. She joins in. It's the kind of detail that tells you everything about the relationship.
Women in Burundian coffee
Gender equity isn't a side note in JNP's work – it's central to it. In Burundi, where 87% of the population lives below the poverty line and women make up a significant proportion of the agricultural workforce, access to education and economic opportunity remains deeply unequal. Women have historically lacked full property ownership rights and have been paid less than male counterparts for the same work.
JNP Coffee has focused on paying women directly for their labour and recognising their contribution at every stage of the supply chain. The results are tangible: women who were subsistence farmers are becoming entrepreneurs, their children are accessing education, and communities are building resilience. Jeanine has spoken openly about how, in Burundi, women typically reinvest 90% of their income back into their families – making investment in women producers one of the most effective ways to strengthen entire communities.
The people behind the coffee
It's worth pausing on what “2,000 smallholder farmers” actually means. In Burundi, the average coffee farmer works a tiny plot – often just a couple of hundred trees – producing less than a pallet of speciality-grade coffee per season. That's too little to attract a buyer independently. Cooperatives and washing stations exist precisely to aggregate these micro-lots into exportable volumes while maintaining traceability and quality.
At Hafi, the farmers aren't anonymous contributors to a bulk lot. They're families who've been cultivating coffee for generations, often on trees planted decades ago. Many of the Bourbon cultivars in Muyinga are legacy plantings – old-growth trees whose root systems and genetic character have been shaped by the specific volcanic soils and microclimate of this particular hillside. The farmers may not know the exact sub-variety on their plot (whether it's Jackson, Mbirizi, Kent, or another Bourbon relative), but they know their trees intimately – how they respond to weather, when to pick, what produces the best fruit.
The success of Hafi has been remarkable. Demand for the coffee has led to a doubling of the number of drying beds at the cooperative, and JNP has committed to buying all the coffee these farmers can produce. For a community that was, not long ago, too remote for anyone to visit easily, that's a significant shift.
Muyinga Province
Muyinga sits in Burundi's northeastern corner, bordering Tanzania. It's one of the country's less well-known coffee regions – Kayanza and Ngozi to the west get more of the spotlight – but that relative obscurity is exactly what drew JNP's attention. The province's rolling hills, volcanic soils, and elevations averaging around 1,700 to 1,800 metres create ideal conditions for Bourbon, and the cooler temperatures at altitude slow cherry maturation, concentrating sugars and developing the intense fruit character that Muyinga coffees are known for.
The region has a typical Burundian climate with well-defined wet and dry seasons. The main harvest runs from around February through June, peaking in March and April. The combination of seasonal rains and limited flat land for drying means post-harvest processing here requires patience and care – drying times on raised beds can stretch to three or four weeks, with constant turning and monitoring to ensure even fermentation and prevent spoilage.
Burundi itself borders Rwanda to the north (the two countries share almost identical coffee terroir and were once a single territory), Tanzania to the east, and the Democratic Republic of Congo to the west. Lake Tanganyika – the world's second-deepest freshwater lake – forms much of its western border. It's a country of steep green hills, red volcanic earth, and an intensity of colour and landscape that belies its small size.
Looking ahead
The Hafi story is still being written. What began as a community too far from the nearest mill to produce washed coffee has become a cooperative whose natural lots are sought after by speciality roasters globally. The aspiration encoded in the name – near – has taken on new meaning: not just proximity to infrastructure, but closeness to market, to opportunity, and to recognition for work done well.
For us, this is a relationship we're proud to be part of. Burundi remains one of speciality coffee's most exciting and underexplored origins, and the farmers at Hafi are a big part of why.
