Why do we work with women in coffee? - Part II
bean voyage works with smallholder women coffee producers in Latin America to create thriving coffee businesses. Over a period of time, we have been asked for our thoughts on areas of impact in the field — especially on the socioenvironmental dynamic that exists in coffee and rural communities that we work with.
In this article series, our volunteer intern, Sunaina Sunda, explains the rationale behind our work. The first of its kind, Sunaina answers the question of why we work with women in coffee, based on her extensive desk research and interviews with smallholder women producers in our network in Costa Rica, and the team.
This is the second part of the article on Gender. To read the first part, click here. We welcome your thoughts in comments, and via our email: hello@beanvoyage.org.
Credit: Alexa Romano
In the first part of the Gender article, we discuss the definition of power, and the overall framework of Empowerment discussed by Naila Kabeer, and the three areas of impact: resources, agency, and achievements. In the first article, we unpacked factors within the first area of impact - resources. In this article, we further unpack the rest of the areas of impact, and how we are addressing them.
Reduced Agency among Coffee-Producing Women
One of the main measurements of agency is decision-making ability. According to the ICO, the following can also be considered expressions of agency: the ability to move freely, resource control, freedom from risks related to violence, and the ability to express one’s voice to influence policy. These expressions of agency are interrelated, so we will explore how they arise together.
Resource Control and Decision-Making
Since coffee production is viewed as a masculine domain, machismo values influence women’s role in coffee production. In some instances, when landowning women get married, they will oftentimes informally hand over the land to their husbands, leaving them with less control over the land. Even if women own land on paper, many don’t actually control earned income.
With regard to decision-making on financial assets, even though some families interviewed in Nestlé’s Fraijanes, Guatemala study said they divide financial management between men and women, 60 percent of study participants, regardless of gender, believe that men should be the main financial managers. Men and women also have different perceptions on who makes decisions regarding major expenses. In the same study, more men than women think that major expenses are decided by men and women together, while more women than men believe that major expenses are solely decided by men. ICAFE also noted that women often don’t have the autonomy or decision-making power to request loans.
Machismo tends to limit women to less visible roles within coffee production; ICAFE noted that because men are often considered the main decision-makers, women are forced to take on supportive roles, such as roles in administrative tasks. In the study based in Fraijanes, Guatemala, participants indicated that women are solely involved in coffee harvesting. Harvesting tasks tend to be labor intensive, including responsibilities like picking, drying, and washing cherries, as well as quality control. Women who participate in informal wage work and unpaid family work, both of which include productive and reproductive labor, aren’t adequately compensated and don’t receive additional benefits like social security; their work is simply seen as “help.”
Since women are expected to allocate more time to household tasks than men, gender norms that arise from machismo can pressure women into prioritizing reproductive labor. These traditional expectations can lead to women facing poverty and bearing the double, or triple, burden, all of which can force them to forgo opportunities to participate in decision-making activities outside of the household.
One study noted that women can internalize gender stereotypes regarding coffee production tasks. For example, although some women outright rejected the notion that women are physically too weak to carry out certain tasks compared to men, other women believed so, even though later statements they made contradicted these beliefs.
Ability to Move Freely + Express One’s Voice & Freedom from Violence-related Risks
Women who want to join all-women cooperatives can experience more pushback from male family members, as noted by some women who joined ASOMOBI, an all-women coffee cooperative based in Costa Rica. In fact, on average, Root Capital noted that women cooperative members attend fewer meetings than men. Even if women producers join cooperatives, Root Capital discovered that more women than men stated that they feel some level of discomfort speaking up in large group discussions or participating in decision-making activities. An inability to move freely to access organizations can have serious implications for women’s safety and well-being. In general, rural women are more likely to face domestic violence compared to urban women, but are less likely to receive help since rural women have less access to support groups.
Lowered Potential for Achievements
Achievements depend on resources and agency; since machismo reduces access to resources and limits women’s agency, for the most part, women have less potential to realize their goals and empower themselves compared to men.
The most evident area where women experience a lowered potential for achievement is within cooperatives. As noted above, there are many barriers to accessing cooperatives and few opportunities to obtain leadership positions, an important resource that requires decision-making; therefore, oftentimes, women simply don’t have a wide range of possibilities that allow them to enact empowering changes, meaning they have a lower potential to achieve their goals. For example, CoopeAgri, a mixed-gender coffee cooperative in Costa Rica, established an all-women’s committee, and women who were part of this committee felt that they benefited from it, indicating that having access to decision-making positions is likely empowering.
However, as of 2017, CoopeAgri was the only coffee cooperative in Costa Rica that had an all-women’s committee. Root Capital also noticed that, as of 2014, in Guatemala, women are “virtually absent from cooperative boards.” These studies indicate that there exist few leadership positions that allow women coffee producers to use their decision-making skills to achieve outcomes, like policy creation, that will guarantee empowerment.
Why You Should Care:
Besides the what-should-be-the-obvious-humanitarian-reason for you to care about gender equality in coffee, eradicating gender gaps, across the board, is beneficial to the coffee industry since it can increase coffee yield and improve quality. With regard to coffee quality, one study reported increased coffee cupping scores when both women and men participated in technical training sessions.
At the societal level, empowering rural women can lead to social, economic, and environmental improvements within rural communities. Humanitarian crises also tend to impact women more severely than men. So, when addressing coffee industry-specific issues and crises, it’s imperative to always consider their impacts on women and ensure that solutions are gender equitable. In the next three articles in this series, we will focus on the following issues that coffee producers face: climate change, income insecurity, and food insecurity, all of which are issues that Bean Voyage has been dedicated to eradicating within the context of gender inequality.
Although gender inequality is a pervasive issue throughout Latin America and the world, it’s important to keep in mind that individual women experience gender inequalities at a deeply personal level. Furthermore, empowerment within the coffee sector can extend beyond coffee production. For example, the development of greater confidence or an improved sense of self-worth from participating in cooperatives is valuable outside of these organizations. Given these realities, one of the most important reasons to eradicate gender inequalities within the coffee sector is to improve the overall quality of individual women’s lives.
Bean Voyage’s approach:
To break the cycle of poverty affecting coffee-farming communities and support women farmers in leading a thriving livelihood, Bean Voyage works to increase their access to educational opportunities, markets, political engagement, and health and well-being support.
We achieve our mission through the Care Trade model: A bundle of services aiming to increase farm income by facilitating access to knowledge, seed capital, markets, and mentorship for smallholder women coffee farmers.
click the image to learn more about our model. Design by Francis Gutierrez.
The Care Trade model consists of:
Training: We organize topic-specific workshops to improve farm outputs and support farmers to mitigate risks (economic, environmental, and social). We have collaborated with nearly 1,000 smallholder women coffee farmers on topics such as climate adaptation, food security, farm and household finance, entrepreneurial leadership, and market readiness.
Finance: We fund microgrants (what we call, ‘seed capital’) to further support farm improvement and business development projects. We have funded 120+ farmer-designed and led business projects with an average grant size of $578 per farmer (a cumulative of $85,500 to date as of March 2024;).
Mentorship and Advocacy: We provide year-long mentorship while advocating for greater representation of smallholder women at a policy level. In 2021, we worked in collaboration with ICAFE to create Costa Rica's first coffee Gender Policy, which is now being implemented by the regional offices of Costa Rica's federal government in 2022-23. We also co-led a participatory documentary project for five of Bean Voyage’s farmers in collaboration with Needle & Frame which will allow us to raise greater awareness at a national and international level. In 2022, we formed the first Farmer Advisory Council consisting of 5 former graduates of Bean Voyage to more effectively provide the advocacy platform for all alumni and to deepen the reach of mentorship programs.
Market Access: We establish market linkages with direct-trade coffee buyers around the world. We have exported Womxn-Powered Coffee to roasters in Europe, North America and Asia, resulting in $250,000+ in farm income for smallholder women. We have traded Womxn-Powered Coffee with roasters such as De Mello, JackedUp Jill (Canada), Girls Who Grind (UK), Cute Coffee, James Coffee Co (USA), and Bean Brothers and Fritz Coffee Company (South Korea) amongst others. This direct access and communication between our partner producers and buyers result in a 212% increase in prices (over the market price).
Achieving gender equality in coffee farming communities can feel like a mountainous goal to accomplish. Nonetheless, it is possible if actors across the coffee value chain come together to collaborate and work together. We invite everyone in the coffee industry to join us and many others as we build a more equitable and sustainable coffee value chain together.
Definitions:
Coffee cooperative: “a group of coffee producers cooperating to gain better access to resources, leverage better marketing and business opportunities, provide training, and more.”
Coffee cupping: “The coffee tasting and scoring methodology… developed by the Specialty Coffee Association.”
Cupping score: a scale from 0 to 100 that determines the quality of a coffee; “only coffees scoring 80 points or above get the ‘specialty coffee’ badge of honor. Commercial-grade coffee scores anywhere from 60 to 80.”
Gender: “the socially constructed roles, behaviors, expressions, and identities of girls, women, boys, men, and gender diverse people”
Intersectionality: “the ways in which systems of inequality based on gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability, class and other forms of discrimination ‘intersect’ to create unique dynamics and effects.”
Sex: “the different biological and physiological characteristics of females, males and intersex persons, such as chromosomes, hormones, and reproductive organs”
Smallholder farm: “a family-owned enterprise operating on up to 10 hectares, or 24 acres.”
Using Kabeer’s framework of empowerment, we analyze our impact through three areas of impact: resources, agency, and achievements. In this article, we reviewed factors within the two areas of impact -agency and achievements-. To read more on the framework, and the other area of impact — resources — , click the button below.
This article was initially published in October 2022, then updated in March 2024.
About Bean Voyage
Bean Voyage is a feminist nonprofit with the mission to build thriving agri-businesses with smallholder women farmers in Latin America. Through a bundle of services called Care Trade, Bean Voyage provides training, financing, market access, and mentorship to smallholder women farmers. To date, we have generated over $600k in revenue for nearly 1,000 smallholder women in Costa Rica and Mexico. An average Bean Voyage partner earns 212% more income than the current commodity market prices as a result of the Care Trade program.