From little coffee beans, a co-operative movement has grown that now supports the sisterhood by ensuring its 6,000 strong female farmers across nine countries get paid into their own hands
The movement, called Café Femenino, gives coffee lovers a fresh reason to enjoy a cup of their favourite brew, for the brand you choose can empower the people who grow it too.
It’s a fact that has preoccupied social entrepreneur Isabel Uriarte Latorre since her earliest days as a sociology student in the 1970s in Lambayeque, a coastal city in northern Peru.
As the daughter of farmers who had migrated to the city in search of a better life, she developed an interest in the lives of women in the South American country’s rural communities. Much of what she learned upset her: While women in these agrarian regions were responsible for picking the beans, they existed at the foothills of what is a mountainous global industry.
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Coffee is one of the world’s biggest traded commodities; for developing countries it has long been one of the most important. Around 160 million bags of commodity beans are traded each year, worth tens of billions of euro.
Coffee bean picking is hard to automate, and it remains highly labour intensive. Much of the work is and has always been done by women. Back in the 1970s, the money for the crop, in what were traditional patriarchal societies, went to their husbands.
Fast forward to 1995 and by now qualified sociologist Isabel was specialising in women’s empowerment. She put the theories she had learned into practice and set up CICAP, an NGO with a social agenda to improve the lives of women in coffee-growing communities.
She was involved in numerous workshops aimed at helping women establish their rights, consolidate their participation in trade organisations, and in pushing women into leadership roles. Yet in many cases, she found, her efforts only made the workers’ lives worse.
“Women experienced even more suffering.” Isabel says. “Marginalisation, subordination, physical and sexual violence was common.”.
It’s not as if things weren’t difficult enough already for women. “Parents often organised arranged marriages for economic advantage. In many of those partnerships, women had no right to an opinion. Girls from as young as 13 and 14 were already mothers.”
Five years later, in 2000, Isabel helped set up Cecanor, an organic goods cooperative for coffee farmers in the Lambayeque region of Peru. She quickly found that, here too, the voices of the women involved in coffee farming were not being heard.
In retrospect it was no surprise. “Men still had control over women’s lives. For example, women were not allowed to attend co-up meetings without their husband’s permission,” she says.
Smashing the poverty trap
Isabel reckoned that the most effective way to raise the status of women in rural communities, and to improve both their lives and those of their children, was to see to it that, somehow, they got paid directly for their labour in the coffee fields.
She also realised that the answer to the problem facing women growers lay at the far end of the supply chain, with consumers.
Working with five coffee producers and Optco, a US-based trading company that specialises in importing organic coffee, she co-founded Café Femenino in 2003. The brand’s USP is that it pays women not just a premium for their coffee but pays it directly to them.
For context, these regions remain patriarchal in culture where men and women are often married, or at least work on the farm together, explains Catherine Casserly, marketing director at Bewley’s.
“Women are still expected to do most of the work on the farm and household,” she says. “For the most part the men still take the dried coffee to the buying station, collect the payment from selling the coffee to the cooperative, and then control that revenue and the decisions as to how it is spent. This creates an inequitable situation where women have no visibility for the work they do.”
With Café Femenino, the women are encouraged to create a separate coffee product for sale, for which they receive a premium and are paid directly, Casserly explains. “This changed everything. This gave them decision-making power for the first time in their lives.”
The brand, which took off around the globe, has helped improve the lives of female farmers in Peru, such as Paula Chavez.
Over time, women’s living conditions and land ownership rights improved. Control over their income helped women growers diversify into new crops to smooth out the seasonality of coffee production.
It helped improve their family’s nutrition and ensured they had enough money for education costs for girls as well as boys, thus improving opportunities for the generations to come.
The proof of its success can be seen in its growth. From just five women initially there are now 700 Café Femenino women growers in Peru alone.
Its success saw the model spread internationally. Today there are 6,000 Café Femenino women growers across Colombia, Brazil, Bolivia, Guatemala, Nicaragua and Mexico, as well as Rwanda and Sumatra. All get paid directly. All of their produce is Fair Trade-audited and organically certified annually.
Isabel’s initiative has also led to the establishment of a Café Femenino Foundation. The not-for-profit raises funds for community development projects, from communal gardens to animal breeding programmes, water and sanitation projects and income diversification training. All help to ensure that the families these women are in charge of have enough to eat and funds for schooling throughout the year, not just during the coffee-growing season.
Consumer power
You can play your part too. Bewleys, a brand synonymous with coffee in Ireland, has partnered with Café Femenino to create a very special brew, one that gives back, with 50 cents of the purchase price of its coffee packs going back to the women who grew the beans through the Café Femenino Program standards.
Isabel is characteristically modest about her achievement in taking what was a grassroots movement global. But the figures are impressive. Women now make up 55 per cent of the members of Cecanor, the co-op, including at top management level.
Isabel still works with the Café Femenino growers today and, fittingly, has been joined in her work by her daughter Claudia, a lawyer, who is helping safeguard its progress for the next generation.
For her part Claudia, who has grown up understanding the “Femenino effect”’ and knowing the difference her mother has made to coffee farming women around the world, is less reticent. “I’ve been proud of her since I was born,” she smiles.
Enjoy great tasting coffee that empowers. You can buy the pure Peruvian single origin ground coffee at Bewley’s Café, Grafton St, Dublin 2, Bewleys.com, or at Avoca, Dunnes and Tesco stores