Kigali Farms !nspirafarms partnered to bring the first solar powered cold storage plant to Rwanda

Worldwide the mushroom industry is valued at US$20 billion, and in Rwanda the national government has been promoting the cultivation of mushrooms both for their economic potential and nutritional value.

Laurent Demuynck, CEO and Founder of Kigali Farms in Rwanda, started the social enterprise in 2010 with the twin goals of massively improving nutrition in rural areas and supplying high value produce to urban markets, domestically and as exports to the East African Community and beyond.

Says Demuynck,“our new button mushroom facility positions us to be the leading mushroom supplier in East Africa, with quite possibly the best button mushrooms produced anywhere in Africa. At the same time, our Kigali Farms team is driven to make oyster mushrooms the cheapest and easiest to grow source of protein for thousands, even hundreds of thousands, of smallholder farmers. Africa produces three times less commercial mushrooms than Australia, and we want to change that”.

The company started by producing and selling oyster mushroom growing kits for farmers and more recently using locally sourced wheat straw to grow fresh button mushrooms, which provide attractive margins in international markets. Kigali Farms has also begun to move further up the value chain, producing mushroom powder, which is used to fortify food products, and developing various packaged products, such as soups and sauces.

In 2015, Kigali Farms partnered with !nspiraFarms® and PSDAg* to bring the first solar powered cold storage plant to Rwanda as a cost-effective, reliable and low-carbon method to reduce post-harvest losses, maintain high quality and increase shelf-life of the mushrooms.

As Kigali Farms grows, it is engaging an increasingly large community of smallholder farmers. It provides its farmers with a combination of education and capacity development in conjunction with supplier contracts. With the capacity to process in excess of 250 metric tons of mushrooms per year and annually produce upwards of 300 ton of oyster mushroom growing kits, Kigali Farms continues to extend its outreach to local farmers across Rwanda.

To know more about Kigali Farms: http://www.kigalifarms.com/

To know more about !nspiraFarms: http://www.inspirafarms.com/

*The Rwanda Private Sector Driven Agriculture Growth (PSDAG) is a 5-Year project funded by USAID