The Ivan Shema Story : Turning Rwanda's Thousand Hills Into a Global Coffee, Tea, and Fruit House

There is a particular kind of entrepreneur emerging across East Africa right now — one who was educated in Europe, understands how European buyers think, and has chosen to bring that fluency home rather than build a career inside it. Ivan Shema, founder and CEO of 1000 Hills Products, is one of them.

Shema studied at the Warsaw School of Economics and built his professional base in the Kraków metropolitan area, giving him a working understanding of Central European trade, retail, and investment logic. Rather than staying inside that system as an employee, he turned it into a bridge. 1000 Hills Products now runs as a dual-market operation: production rooted on the shores of Lake Mugesera in Rwanda, and a subsidiary and warehouse in Poland positioned to distribute across the wider European market. It is a structure that mirrors what RIC Brands calls the UK–Africa trade bridge model — production sovereignty at origin, market access abroad.

The farm and the philosophy

1000 Hills Products describes itself simply as a modern coffee and fruit farm in Rwanda, driven by quality and value-added production. Its farm on Lake Mugesera is built around what the company calls a circular processing model — solar energy, efficient irrigation, and biogas-powered drying, with every by-product converted into value, including natural fertilizers that regenerate the soil the farm depends on. It is agriculture designed to leave the land better than it found it, not merely to extract from it.

The company's product architecture is organized under three house brands. Muhabura Coffee covers specialty microlot and cascara coffees for both espresso and alternative brewing. Muraho! Coffee is positioned as the accessible, best price-to-quality entry point for espresso and drip machines. Kivu Tea produces organic, naturally rolled loose-leaf teas in FOP and FBOP orthodox grades. Izuba Farm rounds out the portfolio with organic sun-dried fruits — a diversification that captures more of the harvest and more of the value than raw export alone ever could.

The farm itself has become a destination in its own right, with 1000 Hills Products building an agro-tourism offering that invites visitors to experience the terraces, the processing systems, and the farming families behind the product — turning provenance into an experience buyers and consumers can walk through, not just read about.

Backed to scale, not just to survive

Shema's venture has been selected into the develoPPP Ventures programme, a joint initiative of the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) and DEG Impulse, which channels non-dilutive capital and technical assistance into East African startups with proven revenue and clear developmental impact — a portfolio now spanning close to a hundred companies across Kenya, Rwanda, and Tanzania. It is the kind of backing that does not ask a founder to give up ownership to grow, and it places 1000 Hills Products alongside a cohort of Rwandan agribusinesses being positioned for regional and international scale.

Shema has used that platform actively rather than passively. At a roundtable during the EU–Rwanda Investment Forum under the Global Gateway initiative, he pressed the case for tailored grace-period adjustments on loans extended to agricultural producers — a policy detail that matters enormously to any farmer whose income is seasonal but whose repayment schedule is not. He has hosted Rwanda's Minister of Local Government and the Governor of Eastern Province at the 1000 Hills Products facility, and has engaged with develoPPP Ventures founder cohorts as far afield as Tanzania, building the kind of peer network that turns individual farms into a regional movement.

A story worth filming

Shema's profile extends beyond the trade press. He is known internationally as a subject of *The Second Sunrise: Coffee and Rwanda*, a 2018 documentary that used his story to explore the country's coffee sector, and he has been featured in Paris as one of the continent's young entrepreneurs to watch. Between the documentary lens and the investment forum microphone, the throughline is consistent: a Rwandan founder insisting that origin countries should tell their own commodity stories, and capture more of the value in the process.

Why this belongs in the Africa One Brand series

Ivan Shema's model sits precisely at the intersection Africa One Brand exists to document: European market fluency married to African production sovereignty, and a value chain — coffee, tea, and dried fruit — redesigned so that Rwanda keeps more of what its hills produce. 1000 Hills Products is a small operation by global commodity standards, but its architecture — origin-based processing, circular energy use, direct European distribution, and policy engagement on behalf of smallholder financing — is exactly the template Africa's agribusiness sector needs replicated a thousand times over.

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