Inside the Howard G. Buffett Foundation's Big Bet on Rwanda

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.”

Buffett meeting with Kagame last year. Photo: Paul Kagame/Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Kagame, in turn, clearly values his relationship with Buffett. Last year, the Rwandan media prominently covered a meeting at the presidential residence between the two men that had the trappings of a state visit. The year before, Kagame and Buffett had traveled together to NAICO to officially inaugurate the project. In 2017, Kagame awarded Buffett a new national medal of honor he created to recognize important friends to Rwanda — part of a larger strategy by the government to cultivate foreign allies and experts to help drive the country forward.

But there’s also a dark side to Rwanda’s success story under Kagame. His government has “continued to stifle dissenting and critical voices and to target those perceived as a threat to the government and their family members,” according to Human Rights Watch. Some opponents of the government have been murdered or imprisoned; others have disappeared.

When I asked Buffett about Kagame’s human rights record, he said that “it’s not my job to judge him. My job is to invest in a place where I can have an impact.” Buffett said he’d learned a lot about African leaders from many years of traveling the continent. “You can have a Kagame or you can have a Mugabe; there’s not a lot in between.” (Robert Mugabe was the long-time corrupt leader of Zimbabwe.)

Thinking big

Buffett said that he first had the idea of creating an agricultural university in Africa in the early 2000s. Such schools have long existed in the U.S., starting with land grant universities, and helped fuel the country’s rise as an agricultural powerhouse. But these training institutions are in short supply in Africa, even though most people who live on the continent make their living from farming.

Buffett settled on building the school in Rwanda, and also backing NAICO, after “two decades of learning and funding” across Africa. “We picked the place where we can get this done.”

Beyond its strong governance, Buffett was drawn to Rwanda because he saw it as a perfect testing ground for new ways to help smallholder farmers. The country’s hilly terrain is sliced and diced into endless tiny growing plots that much of the population relies on to sustain their households.

The Rwandans who work this land, often with the most basic of tools, are among the many millions of small-scale farmers in Africa. According to an analysis by the foundation, these farmers include “the majority of the rural population that is food insecure.” Helping them do better, says the foundation, is the key to reducing hunger and raising living standards.

While industrial agriculture may eventually come to Africa on a large scale, the foundation believes that this is many years away. For now, a brighter future for most African farmers lies in coaxing more productivity out of growing plots that often aren’t much bigger than a suburban American yard.

Brainstorming ideas

Buffett’s relationship with Kagame opened doors in Rwanda, but the foundation’s closest partner in the government has been the Ministry of Agriculture and Animal Resources, which is led by Gérardine Mukeshimana.

“Howard Buffett is one of the good friends of Rwanda,” Mukeshimana said when I met with her in Kigali. She told me that she and her team had a series of conversations with Buffett in 2014 and 2015 in which they discussed ways that the foundation could boost Rwandan agriculture. “We started brainstorming,” she said. “He wanted to change lives, but in a big way.”

As Buffett tells the story, he and his team had to “build credibility” with the ministry and convince them that the foundation would follow through on its commitments. “We spent a lot of time with the minister. We had to sell ourselves.”

What eventually emerged from these conversations was a plan to do a major irrigation project that would have a big, near-term impact, but also to make a long-term investment by building the agricultural university that Buffett had been dreaming about for years.

“I’ll bring rain”

The Nasho Irrigation Cooperative was the first of these ventures to roll out, beginning operation in 2016 in an arid region of eastern Rwanda. Magnifique Nzaramba, who led the government’s work on NAICO, recalled setting up a meeting between Buffett and the farmers who would benefit from the project. “I want to give you rain you can turn on and turn off,” he told the farmers.

Most of them couldn’t grasp what Buffett was talking about. The “rain” would come from dozens of center pivot irrigation systems powered by solar energy. The pivots are big, long mechanical apparatuses with sprinklers that slowly swing around cropland in a big circle, watering everything below.

Irrigated land at NAICO. Photo: Howard G. Buffett

The Buffett Foundation agreed to cover the cost of the pivots, along with the solar panels, storage batteries and water piping — equipment that would be purchased from overseas. Nzaramba told me that when he shared his initial proposal for the system, Buffett said: “Let’s double it.” That reaction was typical of Buffett, Nzaramba would learn. “He’s always looking to do more.”

Ultimately, NAICO came to have 63 center pivots and a 3.3-megawatt solar plant that covers land worked by 2,099 small farmers. Nzaramba said that he thought that building this infrastructure would be the hardest part of the project. It wasn’t. The real work came in convincing farmers to relocate from homes on land that would be under the pivots and move to new houses built by the government. The farmers also had to be persuaded to grow the same crops and work together far more closely in a cooperative. Another shift has been to use improved seeds and fertilizers, among other changes in farming practices that aim to boost productivity.

These efforts took time, but Nzaramba said that the farmers who became part of NAICO have now increased their crop yields six-fold. These earnings are enabling the farmers to pay all the costs of operating the irrigation equipment and solar plant, which requires a small staff — making the system self-sustaining, with no further funding from the foundation. Achieving that goal was important to Buffett, said Minister Mukeshimana. “He’s all about sustainability.”

As for Buffett’s main goal for NAICO — a big, near-term impact — Mukeshimana said that this cropland is now the most productive in all of Rwanda. “In the course of a few years, it’s really changed how people live.”

A school rises

Building a new agricultural university from scratch has taken more time. Once the foundation got the go-ahead from the Rwandan government and secured the land for RICA, its next move was to bring in the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL) to work out all the details — like staffing up a faculty, developing a curriculum, and developing ideas for a campus where students could engage in experiential learning.

Buffett’s ties to UNL, a leader in agricultural research, go back many years. Richard Ferguson said his first contact with Buffett had come when the foundation asked UNL to do an assessment of farming in Ghana. Later, Buffett and the university worked together on a foundation-funded program to send students from Rwanda to UNL to study agriculture. When Ferguson was asked to help create and lead RICA, he agreed, viewing the venture as a nice capstone to his career. “It was just a tremendous opportunity. It’s hardly ever that one gets to build an institution from scratch — and without having to worry about the funding!” Ron Rosati, who then was serving as dean of Nebraska Technical College of Agriculture, also signed on, and now serves as RICA’s vice chancellor of administration and operations.

Ferguson and Rosati embody the kind of high-level expertise and professionalism that Buffett hopes to nurture among a new vanguard of Rwandan-born agriculture leaders. They’ve both spent their career engaged in hands-on research and teaching in the heart of America’s breadbasket, giving decades of consideration to topics like soil management, seed quality, fertilizers and pesticides.

Students work the land at Rica. Photo: RICA

Agriculture is much more complex than most people realize. A lot of elements need to come together just right for a farmer to get the most from their cropland. “There’s nothing simple about farming,” Buffett told me. “It’s the most complicated thing you’ll ever do.”

Succeeding as a farmer requires an enormous learning curve, which is why experiential education is such an important feature of agricultural schools. Students literally need to get their hands dirty right away. “They need to understand both the theory and practice of agriculture,” said Ferguson. RICA has both a demanding academic curriculum and multiple opportunities for hands-on learning.

Beyond the poultry, dairy, swine and food processing facilities, each dormitory has its own small plots of land that students grow crops on. The sprawling campus, which will eventually include 69 buildings, also has larger swaths of farmland under cultivation, along with irrigation systems and livestock. And it has a big emphasis on entrepreneurship for those students who want to develop businesses in agriculture.

Magnifique Nzaramba, who left the Ministry of Agriculture to join RICA, told me that a key part of the school’s mission is to elevate the status of agricultural leaders in Rwanda. Right now, farming tends to be associated with poverty and back-breaking manual labor. But Rwanda’s government has loftier ambitions that look beyond this kind of age-old grind. It aims to spur new agricultural businesses, along with product innovation and exports, to move the country up the agriculture value chain. And that requires luring talented young people into this sector with a credible promise of exciting careers that command respect. “They need to become distinguished members of society,” Nzaramba said.

It’s not hard to see why that goal would be so energizing to Howard Buffett, the son of a legendary investor who made the oddball choice to become a farmer.

A long-term play

It’s too early to say how much impact the Buffett Foundation will ultimately have with its big investments in Rwanda.

While NAICO has been operational for a while, delivering immediate benefits, RICA remains a work in progress. Large parts of the campus are still under construction and the first class of 80 or so students isn’t set to graduate until next year. How will these young people and those who follow impact Rwanda’s future? That question won’t be answered for years, although Jean Claude Kayisinga — another former government official now working at RICA — told me that prospective employers in Rwanda are keenly awaiting the school’s first grads.

Philanthropy has a long history of investing in leadership and human capital more broadly. But the causal link between such grants and impact can be hazy. With RICA, Buffett is making a $175 million bet that training a new cadre of agricultural leaders can have catalytic effects in a nation that depends so heavily on this sector. While that seems like a reasonable hunch, it’s still a huge gamble.

And then there are the larger risks that come with funding in Africa. For now, Rwanda is stable and well governed. But that could change, given the country’s tragic history and its persistent tensions with neighboring Congo, not to mention any eventual blowback to Kagame’s autocratic leadership.

Buffett is OK with such uncertainties. Years ago, when I first interviewed him, he talked about how he sees philanthropy as “society’s risk capital” — a point that his father has also often made. His bold investments in Rwanda demonstrate that this credo remains a driving force in how he does business. One can only hope that other major grantmakers — who too often play things safe — are paying attention.

More by David Callahan