I’m standing on a college campus that is being built from scratch on 3,200 acres of farmland in central Rwanda, an African country of 13 million that’s about the size of Vermont.
The dormitories and a large outdoor dining hall are already finished, but lots of other construction is still underway, including a dairy “enterprise” that will house cows and milking machines, poultry and swine centers where students will learn how to raise chickens and pigs, and a building where students will learn how to make high-value agricultural products from fruits and vegetables.
I’m being shown around the new Rwanda Institute of Conservation Agriculture (RICA) by Richard Ferguson, a vice chancellor at the school. Ferguson spent most of his career teaching at the University of Nebraska, where his research focused on soil science, among other topics. But he upended his life a few years ago to move with his wife to Rwanda to oversee the creation of RICA — an opportunity, he said, that “I couldn’t turn down.”
The school aims to be Rwanda’s flagship agricultural university, training a new generation of leaders for a sector that employs 70% of the country’s workers and accounts for nearly a third of its GDP.
RICA, which admitted its first class of 84 students in 2019, is being built on land donated by the Rwandan government. But the cost of constructing the school, along with its operating budget for the first 10 years, is being covered by the Howard G. Buffett Foundation, the philanthropy led by Warren Buffett’s eldest son. The entire price tag is likely to run around $175 million, making RICA the foundation’s biggest-ever investment.
This isn’t the only large-scale venture in Rwanda by Buffett and his small team, which is led by Ann Kelly Bolten. They also financed the Nasho Irrigation Cooperative (NAICO), which cost over $50 million and has led to huge gains in crop yields by 2,100 smallholder farmers in Rwanda’s drought-prone eastern region.
In an interview, Buffett called RICA and NAICO “the best investments we’ve ever made.”
Buffett first announced his large-scale commitment to Rwandan agriculture in 2015. Since then, news has been sparse about what he’s doing in the country. Despite giving away $222 million last year, his foundation keeps a low profile and doesn’t go looking for media coverage. But the scale of its investment in Rwanda is striking, amounting to one of the most ambitious big bets in global development by any grantmaker today. This work is driven forward by an unusually hands-on funder and made possible by a close partnership with Rwanda’s government.
I recently visited Rwanda on vacation, mainly to see the mountain gorillas, and thought to check in with the foundation before I left. That email led me to a visit to RICA, and to learn the long backstory behind the Buffett Foundation’s high-stakes involvement in Rwanda.
“First and foremost a farmer”
Long before Howard G. Buffett became a major philanthropist, helping give away one of the world’s largest fortunes, he was a farmer.
Buffett started farming in his 20s, after dropping out of college and kicking around in search of a purpose. With some initial help from his father, Buffett bought a farm in Nebraska and, in time, he would be farming 1,500 acres in central Illinois. “I consider myself first and foremost a farmer,” he wrote in his 2014 book, “Forty Chances.” “I am never happier than when I’m sitting in a tractor or a combine during planting or harvest season.”
But Buffett had other passions, too. He became an avid world traveler and wildlife photographer. And in 1999, he began engaging in philanthropy after his parents gave each of their three children $26 million to establish individual foundations.
Wildlife conservation was an early focus of Buffett’s giving. He bought a parcel of land in South Africa to set up a cheetah habitat and research center, among other activities. Traveling across Africa, he came to see a strong link between hunger and conservation. Threats to wildlife are driven by extreme poverty in many parts of the world, as people turn to poaching and deforestation to survive. As he wrote later, “If I cared about endangered species, if I cared about habitat preservation and biodiversity, I realized I had to shift my efforts to a more fundamental issue. I had to work the hunger side of the equation.”
That epiphany led Buffett to focus his foundation on food security. In 2006, this work received a massive boost when his father began making annual disbursements of Berkshire Hathaway stock to each of his children’s foundations, as well as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Year after year, the Howard G. Buffett Foundation has put nearly all this wealth to work as soon as it comes in. In addition to food security, it currently makes grants for conflict mitigation and public safety.
The foundation works across Central America — it’s one of the few major funders that prioritizes that critical region — as well as in Colombia and also in the United States. But it is Africa that has most captured Buffett’s imagination over the years. He’s been to every country on the continent and tells me that he has funded projects in 44 of these countries. Today, though, most of the foundation’s work in Africa is focused on Rwanda.
Beyond RICA and NAICO, the foundation has funded a number of other major initiatives here over recent years. It spent $17 million in 2014 to rebuild a border crossing between Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) to facilitate easier exchanges between the two countries, which often have tense relations. It’s also put up more than $30 million for several projects related to ecotourism, including grant money to support bringing rhinos to Akagera National Park. All told, the foundation’s commitments to Rwanda since 2000 total $435 million, with most of that allocated since 2013.
A place to make a difference
Buffett has gone all-in on Rwanda because it’s the one place in Africa where he feels confident that he can have a large-scale impact. His involvement in the country goes back to 1998, just a few years after its devastating genocide, when he funded efforts to protect the mountain gorillas who live in Volcanoes National Park. “Our original investments were in conservation,” he told me.
Later, Buffett’s work on conflict mitigation in the war-torn DRC led to him to develop a relationship with Rwanda’s president, Paul Kagame. Buffett was impressed by Kagame, an autocratic leader who’s held office since 2000 and has spearheaded a remarkable rebirth of a country that had been decimated by mass murder and civil war. Kagame has cracked down on corruption and shown himself to be a results-oriented manager. The country’s poverty rate has fallen sharply over two decades, while social indicators have gone up, along with economic growth.
Buffett told me that Kagame has a remarkable ability to get things done, catalyzing change on a range of fronts. “I have not seen a country develop on the continent the way that Rwanda has developed,” he said. It’s not surprising that Kagame’s hard-charging style would appeal to Buffett, who is known for his own intensity and impatience. In a foreword to “Forty Chances,” his father wrote of Howard: “His only speed is fast forward.”
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Publish date : 2022-08-09 07:00:00
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