Last week, Coffee Farm officially opened its new outlet in Nottingham — marked by a ribbon-cutting ceremony attended by the board of the Aegis Trust, representatives of Nottingham’s Rwandan community, and colleagues from Rwanda who have been at the heart of the project from the beginning.

 

Merv Chia, Chair of the Aegis Peace Fund, welcomed guests to what he described as a historic day — a new initiative connecting the café in the White Rose Outlet on Beastmarket Hill, just off Nottingham’s Old Market Square, directly to over 850 farming families in Rwanda. “This is such an historic day for us,” he said. “We have a cafe that’s connected right down to the coffee farmers we support.”

 

Geoffrey Bungeri, Managing Director of Champion Humanity Trading, who oversees Coffee Farm’s operations on the ground in Rwanda, spoke with evident pride about what the opening represents. “This is the true definition of crop to cup,” he told those gathered. “Being able to get a voice here and represent the farmer — and that quality of the coffee.”

 

For those familiar with the Aegis story, Coffee Farm is the latest chapter in a thirty-year journey that began just down the road. In 1995, the Smith family converted their Nottinghamshire home into Britain’s first Holocaust memorial — driven by the belief that ‘Never Again’ had to mean something real. That commitment eventually drew them to Rwanda, where Aegis established the Kigali Genocide Memorial at the invitation of Rwanda’s authorities, later developing a Peace And Values education programme now built into Rwanda’s national curriculum, reaching over two million students a year.

 

Aegis came to understand that peace education, however effective, is not sufficient on its own. Communities rebuilding after violence also need economic foundations. In 2022, the Aegis Peace Fund was established to address precisely that: investing in social enterprises in communities recovering from conflict or at risk of it, building the economic resilience without which lasting peace is impossible.

 

Coffee Farm is where that mission meets everyday life. The coffee comes from the Muyumbu Coffee Washing Station in Rwanda’s Eastern Province — a community that had been sliding back into subsistence farming before the Aegis Peace Fund’s work helped develop it into a producer of world-class specialty coffee. Grown and hand-picked by over 850 farming families paid above industry standard, with a direct share of every cup sold, the coffee is single-origin, balanced, sweet, floral and fruit-forward. Profits flow back into Aegis Trust’s peace education work and the Kigali Genocide Memorial.As Geoffrey Bungeri put it simply: “Welcome to Coffee Farm. This is not just our pride as an organisation, but the pride of our farmers.”