Profile: Andrew Rugasira – founder & CEO Good African Coffee

Andrew Rugasira., founder and CEO Good African Coffee. PHOTO/File

Andrew Rugasira is the Founder and CEO of Good African Coffee, an African-based social enterprise that brings quality coffees to the global market.

When he set out to wedge his coffee onto supermarket shelves in England and the United States, Andrew Rugasira did not start by making phone calls from his home in Kampala, Uganda. He did not begin by sending e-mails. The distance seemed too great for that. At one end of his business were farmers who, until he came along, thought their beans were purchased and carried off to make gunpowder. At the other were buyers at the corporate headquarters of chains like Waitrose and Sainsbury’s, Whole Foods and Wal-Mart.

If he was going to succeed, he felt he would have to do it physically; it was as if he believed he could stretch himself to span the divide between the two worlds. So he got on a plane to London, without trying any advance contact.

Rugasira has a resilience that may have been forged in childhood. He grew up in Kampala during the terrors of Idi Amin’s reign in the ’70s. When he was around 11, with Amin just driven out, soldiers climbed over the gate in front of his family’s house and carried away the TV, the refrigerator, the furniture, while Rugasira and two of his sisters, who were 7 and 5, huddled on their knees and prayed in a bedroom.

Read more: The New York Times