A group of about one thousand small-holder farmers in Rwanda has just airlifted 70 tonnes (70,000 kg) of avocados to the United Arab Emirates in a single charter flight.
What you need to know about the shipment:
- Quantity: 70 tonnes of fresh avocados
- Destination: UAE
- Exporter: Kumwe Green Farms Ltd.
- Farmers involved: 1,000+
- Young women: About 70% of the farmers supplying the shipment
- Employment: About 200 temporary field jobs were created for harvesting, sorting and transportation.
- Packhouse: A four-day operation employed 64 casual workers per day, around 90% of whom were women.
- Facilitation: The shipment was supported through the Value-Added Initiative to Boost Employment (VIBE), implemented by TradeMark Africa and the Mastercard Foundation.
What is particularly interesting
This isn’t simply a story about Rwanda producing 70 tonnes of avocados. It demonstrates a smallholder aggregation model:
1,000+ farmers → aggregation → quality control → packing → air freight → UAE buyer
Kumwe Green Farms coordinated production from its network of smallholders and handled aggregation, quality assurance, packaging and export logistics to meet UAE requirements.
There is already a strong Rwanda–UAE avocado trade: Rwanda’s government reported in February 2026 that around 90% of Rwanda’s avocado exports go to the UAE.
For Nigerian farmers, there is an important lesson here: you don’t necessarily need thousands of farmers to own large farms individually. A well-organised farmer aggregation + packhouse + quality-control + export logistics system can turn production from many small farms into an export-scale consignment.