Maurice Shyaka

I was in Musanze on Thursday with a small team that collects waste from apartments and three hotels near the main market. No big trucks. They run cargo bikes, sort on the curb, and the food waste goes straight into compost rows and black soldier fly bins behind their yard. What stayed with me was the price. They sell a 50kg bag of organic fertiliser for about rwf 12,000 to potato farmers around Kinigi. That is about half the price of imported fertiliser in the shops. Hotels give them the waste for free because it cuts their collection fees. Apartments pay a small monthly fee. It is not fancy tech, just timing and a serving your community. Are you seeing other towns in Rwanda where the waste loop actually pays for itself like this? #Musanze #Rwanda #CircularEconomy

I was at the Africa Food Systems - AFS Forum breakfast briefing at the Kigali Convention Centre yesterday morning. The room was full of private sector people, not just NGOs. What stuck with me was not the big theme but the driving question: “we keep funding pilots, but we don’t fund the handover.” I thought about founders how they don’t need another demo day. They need someone to pay for the first cold truck, the first three months of a sales hire. The Forum is happening between 1st and 4th September here in Kigali. I’m curious; if you’ve been to AFS before, what actually moved from talk to deal for you? #Kigali #FoodSystems #AFSForum2026

I was at this compost site. The team in blue were turning piles that started as food waste. Farmers bring their own crop residues twice a week and get a credit note for each sack. After 6 to 8 weeks that waste becomes the compost. Those same farmers buy it back at RWF 300 for a kilo instead of RWF 500. Supplier becomes customer. Has anyone made a loop like this hold up through rainy season? #Rwanda #CircularEconomy

I was at a drying shed outside Kigali this Saturday. These are dried bird’s eye chillies going into the sacks! The farmer told me he loses about 15 percent just from moisture because the sun was patchy last week. We weighed a sack before and after one rainy afternoon almost 4 kilos gone. Export price looks fine on contracts, but the drying loss eats the margin before it reaches the packhouse. He is now testing shade nets and turning the chillies twice a day instead of once. No new machine, just timing. If you work with dried crops, what low-cost drying trick has actually cut your loss? #Rwanda #AgriTech #Chilli

I was in Musanze on Thursday with a small team that collects waste from apartments and three hotels near the main market. No big trucks. They run cargo bikes, sort on the curb, and the food waste goes straight into compost rows and black soldier fly bins behind their yard. What stayed with me was the price. They sell a 50kg bag of organic fertiliser for about rwf 12,000 to potato farmers around Kinigi. That is about half the price of imported fertiliser in the shops. Hotels give them the waste for free because it cuts their collection fees. Apartments pay a small monthly fee. It is not fancy tech, just timing and a serving your community. Are you seeing other towns in Rwanda where the waste loop actually pays for itself like this? #Musanze #Rwanda #CircularEconomy

Reading through investors termsheets for two Rwandan climate ventures. Both work in Rwanda and structures that has worked elsewhere. What struck me was not the tech. It was the repayment design. A business like Guershom farms negotiated a quarterly repayment that starts at RWF 10M and rises as they scale. Businesses in Kenya some asks their investors to pay once a year in January because that is when their export cash comes in. At Impact Hub we always talk about tailored support for ventures for their market fit. Here the fit is between the contract and the harvest calendar. A solution informed by the national meteo or sensor only works if the finance lets you survive a bad rain season. Has anyone else seen lenders in Africa actually adapt to biological reality instead of forcing monthly payments? #Rwanda #ClimateFinance #Kenya

This week in my work at Impact Hub Kigali this week with our agri track, it’s always lessons. Three founders are trying to export French beans and chilies. The buyer price looks good on paper, until you add Kigali cold chain costs from farm to airport. One team showed me their sheet. RWF 850 per kilo just for precooling and transport?? That wipes out the margin. We spent an hour redrawing their route, looking at shared cold rooms in Bugesera instead of running half empty trucks. What I am learning in all this, is that export readiness is not just GAP certificates. It is logistics math done early. If you work on horticulture in Rwanda, how are you solving the first mile cold chain without killing price? #Rwanda #Kigali #AgriTech