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A Closer Look at the Entrepreneurs Working in Burundi’s Essential Oils and Tea Sector

Burundi

A New Take on Burundi’s Tea Sector with Prothem

Burundi’s tea history begins in the 1930s, with the first planting of small tea bushes in the country’s central-western highlands before rapidly expanding into the 1960s through larger tea plantations in the Teza and Rwegura regions. By the 1970s, the government created the Office du Thé Burundi (OTB/Burundi Tea Authority) to run the promotion, production and marketing of tea. Today, OTB still operates five of the Burundi’s six tea factories with production remaining largely state-owned.

It is against this backdrop that Prothem stepped up as Burundi’s first private tea manufacturing company, based in Gisozi, Mwaro province, and forged its own kind of entrepreneurship in uncharted territory.

"In the context of stepping into uncharted territory as the first private player in a traditionally state-dominated sector, entrepreneurship takes on an entirely different weight," Prothem's Jerry Bayaga explains.

Part of that weight was regulatory: "Operating in an evolving regulatory framework means policy can shift overnight. When you are the first private tea manufacturing company, you aren't just following rules; you are often helping set the precedent for how private enterprise interacts with regulators, farmers, and export markets." Part of it was simply trust, and trust in a sector like this isn't granted, it's built one harvest at a time.

That meant convincing smallholders who had only ever known a state buyer to instead partner with a private factory "showing up consistently, offering fair pricing, and delivering reliable payouts", while simultaneously proving to global buyers that a first-time private Burundian exporter could match the quality control and supply chain integrity of established state factories.

There is also a physical, unforgiving reality to tea that the founder is careful to name: green leaf has to be processed within hours of plucking, whether or not the power is on, whether or not fuel is available, whether or not transport is running.

Today, Prothem works with more than 8,000 tea growers, producing upward of 1,200 tones of tea a year across six grades; genuinely significant scale for a company that started as an outsider in a state-run sector. But Mr. Bayaga is candid that what entrepreneurship demanded shifted as the company grew. The early days were "boots-on-the-ground engagement ; sitting with local farming communities, establishing agreements, and earning the trust of outgrowers who had only ever known state-run structures," alongside the equally relational work of "recruiting talent into a pioneering vision" and forging relationships with international buyers and auction houses to prove a private Burundian company could deliver consistently at premium quality.

A farmer harvesting tea from a lush green farm

Photo Credit: Getty Images Signature

Engagement with MARKUP II enters the story at the point where Prothem needed to convert that hard-won trust and scale into genuine export competitiveness. On the field side, MARKUP II's technical assistance and coaching helped tighten plucking standards with outgrower farmers around the golden standard of two leaves and a bud.

Inside the factory, Standard Operating Procedures were updated across withering, cutting, fermentation control, drying temperatures, and sorting, cutting batch variation and lifting output grade consistency, alongside work to align processes with voluntary sustainability standards and food safety frameworks like HACCP and ISO. Internal cupping and tasting protocols were standardized so that daily production could be benchmarked directly against regional references like the Mombasa Auction, moving quality from something dependent on "seasonal luck" to something tracked as a daily metric. And MARKUP II's support extended into diversification: East African tea has historically meant black CTC almost by default, and the programme gave Prothem a framework to explore higher-grade Orthodox and specialty green teas, plus more sustainable, retail-ready packaging aimed at positioning Burundian tea as "a distinct premium product rather than an anonymous blend filler."

Asked what advice to pass on to other entrepreneurs working with international and regional tea buyers, Mr Bayaga shares;

"The global tea industry operates within tight-knit networks; buyers, tasters, brokers, and blenders often spend four or five decades in the business, meaning every deal you strike builds or tests your lifelong reputation." Buyers, in this telling, aren't shopping for one-off suppliers, they're building supply relationships that can run decades, which is why the founder frames transparency as non-negotiable even when the news is bad: "If a harvest suffers quality drops or logistics get delayed, open transparency preserves trust far better than trying to cover up a bad batch. A buyer will forgive a bad season, but they will never forgive broken trust."

The other half of the advice is about understanding the buyer's own business, not just your own crop; recognizing whether your tea is providing "color and punch" for a mass-market breakfast blend or "flavor and aroma" for a boutique loose-leaf line, and processing and sorting accordingly, because "the most valuable producer is not always the cheapest, but the one whose factory delivers consistent cupping profiles batch after batch, season after season."

Atlas Energy Oils: Betting Early on Burundi’s growing essential oils sector

Photo credit: Westerwelle Startup Haus Kigali

Essential oils are for Burundi, a genuinely new commodity. Whereas tea and coffee have decades of institutional history behind them, essential oils are still being figured out, through small private players who are making a bet on a new value chain.

Atlas Energy Oils, led by Managing Director Pontien Ntunzwenimana, is one of these private companies. He explains what it takes to build in new territory:

"Today, entrepreneurship means to me having the courage to transform an idea into a sustainable reality, while creating value for the community and the country," Mr.Ntunzwenimana says. He is direct about what that has actually required in practice; "patience, resilience, continuous learning and the ability to adapt to challenges," alongside personal financial commitment and a willingness to take on risk."

Venturing into a new chain also means building the infrastructure, supplier relationships, quality expectations and buyer awareness, and proving that your product can compete internationally. This is where MARKUP’s support has made a difference. He describes this support as something that has helped Atlas Energy Oils to become; “more structured and market-oriented", strengthening the company’s grasp of, “quality requirements, standards, packaging, branding, market access and international trade.”

When asked about market access in the EU and East African region Mr. Ntunzwenimana is candid that this is still very much in progress. He frames things as ongoing as Atlas Energy Oils continues to define customer expectations, regulatory procedures and work toward consistency in supply. There’s a real opportunity that Atlas Energy Oils can see, and provided that company continues to “invest in traceability, certification and professional marketing.”

His advice to anyone considering building an essential oils business is grounded in a simple lesson; start from demand not supply.

"Start with the market, not with the product. Before investing heavily, understand which oils have real market demand, who the potential buyers are and what quality and certification requirements they expect." He's equally insistent on the farmer-facing side of the business ; working closely with growers, securing a "reliable and sustainable raw-material supply," and investing early in quality control, while cautioning that none of it moves quickly: "building an export-oriented essential oils business takes time."

He closes on an optimistic note; his belief that "a product made in Burundi can compete successfully on regional and international markets," if entrepreneurs are willing to build the partnerships that get it there.