SINGAPORE — Every day, Singaporean Rohan Shah rises at five in the morning and gets to work, greeted by a view of the lush Rwandan capital Kigali.

It is the only way to eke out enough hours in a day to run his rum distillery in the city, where Mr Shah, 28, does everything from crushing sugarcane to running his company’s social media.

He told The Sunday Times over a Zoom interview: “It’s a start-up, so I’m doing everything at the moment. But there are other days when I can be kinder to myself, doing yoga or going to my gym which has a great view of the valley... You can build a really beautiful life in Rwanda.”

Mr Shah, who is the founder and one of two people at his rum company Imizi, moved to Rwanda in 2022 to pursue an interest in producing alcohol that began as a hobby while he was in university.

The company distils fresh sugarcane grown by local farmers into rum, and Mr Shah’s exploits were recently mentioned by Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong in Parliament after PM Lee’s visit to Rwanda in June 2022.

Mr Shah said: “Because I come from a family of passionate eaters and cooks, food and flavour were always a very big part of my life.

“Alcohol was, for me, an extension of that. I liked how there’s this alchemical quality to cocktails. I started bartending in my dorm room in college.”

Mr Shah, who went to Harvard University in the United States, said his university cocktail nights started to get more and more ambitious as he learnt more, but he mostly thought of it as a hobby at the time.

After graduating with a degree in social studies, he started working for a non-governmental organisation in the field of international development. He was working with small farmers in countries like India and Ethiopia when he was forced to return home to Singapore in 2020 due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

It was during his time in Singapore that he managed to turn his hobby into a profession.

He began taking weekend shifts at Native, a bar in Telok Ayer famous for making cocktails inspired by local flavours and dishes.

Working there also helped incubate the idea for a business tying together his interests in alcohol, international development and exploring what he called the continued hold European colonialism has on ideas about food and flavour.

He said: “At Native, we were constantly looking for ‘wonderment’ where it hadn’t been found before because of Eurocentrism.

“Couldn’t I bring that same curiosity and sense of wonderment to my work with farmers? After all, alcohol is always an agricultural product first and foremost.”

Eurocentrism is a concept which describes a world view where values or ideas of value are centred on European or Western standards.

He said: “What if we used the hyper-local sensibility I’d picked up at Native to make something premium and beautiful and singular from the types of farmers I worked with in Africa?

“We could then challenge antiquated notions of where quality comes from, and use our access to premium markets to support farmers in various ways. The business also allowed me to combine my passions – being creative and telling stories through alcohol with working on Global South issues.”

The most inspiring thing about Rwanda, he said, is the sense that it is on the cusp of transformation.

“Like post-independence Singapore, there’s this palpable sense of mission in Rwanda. People here want progress, want prosperity, and believe that it can come,” he said, adding that the Rwandan government has been encouraging of that vision and seeks to enable that transformation.