Women in coffee: around the world, women play a major role in the production of coffee. A handful of international associations are working to ensure their access to equal ownership and employment conditions.

• Author: Scholer, Morten

On the family-owned coffee plots that produce most of Africa's coffee, it is usually women who undertake the majority of maintenance and harvesting work. Here, and in other coffee-producing areas around the world, their contribution is vital. Despite this, however, they tend to have little control over the harvest proceeds, and coffee industry structures seldom, if at all, make provision for women's interests. Without information or training beyond purely field-related issues, women have limited opportunity to contribute to the decision-making processes that affect them.

Research shows that increased access to resources for women, particularly in the agricultural industry, has great effects on education, health, nutrition and overall welfare, and on poverty reduction. For women--and thus families and communities--to thrive, traditional gender divisions need to stop confining women to subsistence production and start looking at women's potential in the commercial sphere. Rural women won't be offered the opportunities they deserve until governments make targeted reforms. Awareness and education are crucial.

Associations of women in coffee

Historically, women's groups and associations are a well-established means for improving rights and access to services, thereby providing social and economic empowerment. Capacity building--through access to information, credit, infrastructure and other business development services--is required to ensure women's involvement in decision-making processes.

Using the rich base of knowledge in its Coffee Guide book and the website version at www.thecoffeeguide.org, ITC is currently supporting the Eastern African Fine Coffees Association (EAFCA) with development programmes in 11 countries, including a component on women in the coffee sector. The role of women in coffee has been included as one of the themes at the next annual EAFCA coffee conference in Kigali, Rwanda in February 2009, which ITC is supporting.

In October 2008, ITC arranged to send two female EAFCA employees to Costa Rica for the first truly international conference for women in coffee. Women in Coffee (WIC), a leading information sharing and training organization for women, which is active primarily in Central America, coordinated the conference.

WIC is one of a very small number of organizations dedicated to improving the conditions of women in the coffee sector. Another of the few active associations, Cafe Femenino Foundation, began by assisting...