In the misty Gayo highlands of northern Sumatra, Ibu Rahmah is making her mark on Indonesia’s coffee industry.
Read moreTopics: Southeast Asia | Women in Agriculture |
After years of watching working mothers switch from feeding their children Senegalese grains to imported rice, Bineta Coulibaly decided to take action.
Read moreTopics: Food Security | Stories of Impact | West Africa | Women in Agriculture |
Dora Lisa Carrión Gómez, president of the women's group at the coffee cooperative APROCASSI. Businesswoman. Farmer. Community leader. Mother. Most of us would struggle to be any one of those things. Dora Lisa Carrión Gómez? She’s all four.
Read moreTopics: South America | Stories of Impact | Women in Agriculture |
Women carry stones that will form the foundation of a new sorghum collection and storage center. As part of my role with Root Capital, I’m privileged to travel to remote areas in Africa and Latin America to meet with our clients and the smallholder farmers at the core of their business. Recently, I was in Meru, Kenya, with my colleague Erick Sakwa, Root Capital’s Women in Agriculture coordinator for East Africa.
Read moreTopics: East Africa | Stories of Impact | Women in Agriculture |
Fany Paty, artisan supplier to Art Atlas, a textile business based in Arequipa, Perú. Fany Paty always wanted to run her own business. Like many entrepreneurs, Fany longed for a job where she could have flexible working hours and a healthy degree of independence. But for Fany, this wasn’t a matter of personal preference. She needed to bring in enough money to provide for her family while still having the time to care for them day-to-day.
Read moreTopics: South America | Stories of Impact | Women in Agriculture |
Carmen Blandón, member of Root Capital client Solidaridad, at her home in Matagalpa, Nicaragua For 52-year-old Carmen Blandón, her coffee farm is a business. And she’s the boss.
Read moreTopics: Mexico and Central America | Women in Agriculture |
Kenia Ubeda, general manager of UCCEI, a Root Capital client in Matagalpa, Nicaragua Kenia Ubeda never thought she’d be running a coffee business. “I was an agronomist and a coffee farmer,” she says with a smile on her face. “I didn’t know the first thing about commercializing coffee.” But the community leaders who tapped Kenia to found and run UCCEI, a farmer cooperative in the coffee-fueled town of Matagalpa, Nicaragua, knew she had what it took. And in 2009, Kenia rose to the challenge and became UCCEI’s general manager, overseeing a business currently sourcing from over 900 smallholder farmers in the region.
Read moreTopics: Livelihoods | Mexico and Central America | Stories of Impact | Women in Agriculture |
Throughout our 15 years of lending to agricultural enterprises, we have found that women are often hired for office positions in accounting, marketing, sales and other midlevel management roles – roles that are highly influential but less visible, and therefore less studied and celebrated, than top-tier leadership roles. We call these women “hidden influencers.” In the context of large corporations, McKinsey & Company has defined the term “hidden influencers” as “people other employees look to for input, advice, or ideas about what’s really happening in a company.” Odalis Noeme Guerrero is just one example of a “hidden influencer” we have had the fortune of meeting through our work. Odalis Noeme Guerrero, agronomist at UNICAFEC.
Read moreTopics: South America | Women in Agriculture |
Root Capital SVP Catherine Gill (center) with trip participants. Through this blog, we try to bring you close to our clients and their stories. Sometimes, some of our partners and donors take the opportunity to get even closer, and accompany us over the mountain and down the muddy road to meet the farmers and see firsthand the amazing agricultural businesses we work with. Two weeks ago, the Root Capital crew – our senior vice president, Catherine Gill, our Colombian loan officer, and I – bused around Colombia’s coffee lands with partners from the Weissberg Foundation, Dietel Partners, and the Aspen Institute – on a Women-in-Agriculture-themed trip.
Read moreTopics: South America | Women in Agriculture |
A Root Capital financial management workshop in San Cristobal de las Casas, Chiapas, Mexico. A few years ago, Esperanza Dionisio, the general manager of Pangoa, a coffee cooperative in Peru, told us a story about a meeting she’d recently attended. “There wasn’t a single woman there,” she said. “More than a hundred men, all of them stunned, looking at me like some kind of rare insect. But I had the chance to raise my hand and say something, and they were all shocked. It was just me and all those men, but I had the background and the knowledge, and so in the end they were satisfied, and they appreciated my work.”
Read moreTopics: Advisory Services | Women in Agriculture |