Andrew Rugasira is taking advantage of the recent buzz surrounding the G8 summit and tells John McManus that the solution for the continent lies in trade, not aid.

Andrew Rugasira is fast becoming a poster boy for Africa's new generation of entrepreneurs. The Ugandan businessman has taken full advantage of the sudden resurgence of interest in the continent to relentlessly plug the message that trade and not aid is the solution.

The buzz of interest generated by the G8 Summit and the parallel Live 8 phenomenun has provided him with any number of media opportunities and he has availed of most of them. A quick search of online newspaper databases yields dozens of hits for Rugasira in the last month.

None of this is bad for Rugasira's latest business venture, the Rwenzori Coffee Company, which he holds out as proof of his thesis that allowing African countries access to developed markets is the only long-term solution to the continent's problems.

Set up in 2004, Rwenzori Coffee is a producer of branded Ugandan coffee, but with a difference. The company buys its beans from around 10,000 small farmers, mostly in western Uganda, at above-market prices and is committed to returning half of its profits to the farmers and the local communities.

Sales to date have been a modest $1.7 million (€1.4 million), but the company has recently concluded a deal with the Waitrose supermarket chain in the UK and a similar deal with Africa's biggest chain, the South African-based Shoprite.

Rugasira was in Dublin this week to talk to Bewleys about possible co-operation, following contacts made on a Department of Foreign Affairs-sponsored trip to Uganda earlier this year.

He is unabashed about riding on the coat-tails of the G8 Summit to promote his venture, saying that availing of the media platform that it afforded was an integral part of the launch strategy to get past the not inconsiderable barriers to putting an African-branded commodity product onto UK supermarket shelves.

It is an example of the entrepreneurial instinct that Rugasira believes will provide the solution to Africa's difficulties.

"Our thinking and our philosophy is that Africans are the solution to their own problems and Africa just needs to adopt the strategies the G8 countries adopted...which was to trade their way out of economic underdevelopment," says Rugasira

He cites the contrasting fortunes of the Ugandan and Malaysian economies, which were level pegging when Uganda gained its independence from Britain in 1962.

"The Malaysian economy is now 25 times bigger. How did they achieve that? They achieved it through trade."

Rugasira paints a picture of a virtuous circle in which trade can also conquer what is seen as one of the biggest obstacles to economic development on the continent; endemic corruption.

"Corruption is not an ill you only find in Africa, it is the symptom of underdevelopment, which is expressed in corruption.

"The only way you get around corruption in the long term is to build a community of stakeholders. The more Africans get trading, earning incomes, buying houses, owning property, the less willing they will be to tolerate corruption."

Rwenzori Coffee is, in part, an attempt to test this hypothesis, with its flow back of profits to the farmer stakeholders. Rugasira argues that it will succeed because it will capitalise on a strong sense of community

"One of the most profitable human ethics is sharing... in an interesting way the unofficial safety net is in-built in the African community."

Rugasira's venture has a fair wind behind it, but it is reasonable to ask whether others trying to propagate the model elsewhere would succeed without the backing of the local powerbrokers, whoever they may be. And in Africa this rarely comes without a price.

Rugasira sidesteps the question as to whether he is well connected in Uganda. However, the same online search that highlighted his efforts to promote the trade-not-aid agenda shows numerous links, both professional and personal, with the regime of President Yoweri Museveni, who took power in Uganda in 1986 after overthrowing the previous government.

A graduate of London University's School of Oriental and African Studies, Rugasira - who is now 36 - returned to Uganda in 1992.

His first business venture was a promotion and marketing company called VR Promotions, which in time moved into commodity trading, supplying Ugandan foodstuffs such as maize to the World Food Programme. He was part of a consortium that included a company controlled by Museveni's daughter Patience, according to the Ugandan media.

He is also involved in aviation and his airline, Knight Airways, was one of a number accused, but subsequently cleared, of defrauding the ministry of defence by invoicing for fictitious flights.

Rugasira says that it was his involvement in the commodities business that opened his eyes to the potential of added-value exports and this in turn led to his investment in Rwenzori Coffee.

The decision to adopt the co-operative approach was fundamentally a pragmatic one, he says, as it will produce higher quality coffee in the long run but, at the same time, he is clearly committed to the wider project.

"It is a hypothesis I would like to test... can an empowerment business model lead to welfare improvement... I think it can," he says.

It is hard to doubt Rugasira's sincerity in this regard and it would be doing him an injustice to dismiss his latest venture as a cynical ploy to take advantage of the publicity surrounding the G8 and the ever-present guilt that drives western Europeans to buy Fair Trade products.

What is more significant is his confidence that his country and its peers can, given the chance, solve their own problems. The solutions will not be clear cut and, like the Rwenzori Coffee Company, they will be pragmatic home-grown solutions to problems, which accept rather than deny the realities on the ground.

Rugasira and the generation of African businessmen he represents may yet provide the continent with the leadership it needs.