Do you believe in:
⚖️ Justice for small businesses?
❤️ Women in leadership?
Locally rooted, African-made products?
Then this is your moment.
❗ Kweza Craft Brewery — Rwanda’s first and only craft brewery — will close within weeks without support.
We are a women-led company building something rare: award-winning beer brewed from locally grown sorghum, supporting farmers, creating jobs, and proving African ingredients can produce world-class craft beer.
And we were succeeding.
From Growth to Shutdown — Overnight
By early 2025, Kweza was thriving:
- ⭐ African Beer Cup Bronze Medal (Inzovu IPA)
- Served at Kigali’s top hotels (Convention Center, Marriott, Four Points)
- On shelves in supermarkets, duty-free, and expanding into national distribution
We were scaling fast. Then everything stopped.
In August 2025, our landlord illegally seized our brewery without a court order — locking our doors, trapping our equipment, and freezing our business.
We fought.
We won. The court ruled the seizure illegal. The underlying claim was dismissed.
Yet the landlord continues litigation. We must keep defending ourselves — at enormous cost.
Financial Jeopardy
With no production since August 2025, we were forced to:
- Lay off over half our team - mostly women
- Shut down our taproom
- Drain all our cash reserves for legal defense, relocation, and survival
We are now out of money. We will close our operations within weeks without your support.
Why Kweza Matters
Kweza is more than a brewery. It is a vision.
Women-Led
- In an overwhelmingly male dominated, we are proudly diverse.
Locally Sourced
- We buy sorghum from Rwandan farmers and support traditional malting practices.
Rwanda’s First Craft Brewery
- We built Rwanda’s craft beer industry from scratch.
Culturally Rooted & Globally Competitive:
- Our beers are African in identity, award-winning, and world-class in quality.
We Are So Close to Coming Back
- We have a new location
- Moved our equipment
- Prepared to restart production
We just need to survive the final stretch to get back to production.
Would You Give $5 to Help Us Reopen?
Would you give $5 for:
⚖️ Justice and Small Business survival?
❤️ Keeping a women owned and operated brewery running?
Every dollar matters right now.
We need $20,000 to survive the month.
Every additional dollar helps bring back staff, brews another batch of beer, and gets us back on our feet.
How Your Support Helps
Your contribution goes directly to:
- ⚖️ Legal defense
- Reinstallation, and recommissioning
- Raw materials
- ⚙️ Utilities and compliance
- Rehiring our team
Our goal is to get back to making beer.
Why This Matters Now
Without immediate support, Kweza will permanently close.
If you believe in what we’ve built, if you believe in small businesses fighting to survive, please stand with us. Donate and share.
If you're a visionary partner looking to help us scale and shape the future of Kweza, please get in touch.
Together, we can bring Kweza’s vision back to beer glasses, to livelihoods, to life.
Thank you for standing with us.
Cheers! Kubuzima Bwacu!
— The Kweza Team
NOTE: Location says San Francisco, as GoFundMe locates the fundraiser where the bank address is. This is our Company US bank account location, but our operations are located in Rwanda.