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Take a look around any farming community and you’ll see countless hardworking women producing the food and other commodities that nourish our world. Women plant and tend crops, collect the harvest when it’s ready, work in sorting and processing facilities, oversee finances, manage business operations, train farmers and employees, and own rural enterprises. They constitute 43% of the agricultural workforce…

Since 2007, the all-women AMPROCAL coffee cooperative in Ocotepeque, Honduras has worked hard to connect farmers with higher prices for their coffee on the international market. Starting with just eight members, they’ve grown to over 150 today. That means they’re able to improve livelihoods and grow inclusion for more farmers across the region. For the last four years, Root Capital…

When you run a small enterprise in a rural community, it’s difficult to access the financing you need to grow. If you’re a woman running one of these enterprises, it’s even harder. The International Finance Corporation estimates that up to 70% of women-owned enterprises in emerging markets are overlooked by lenders. These women-owned enterprises face a…

It’s 3 o’clock in the morning. The crickets have stopped chirping and hours will pass before the rooster crows. Elizabeth Garzón Piamba is preparing the fire for breakfast while her family sleeps. After she feeds her children and gets them ready for school, she heads out to work as the sun just peeks over the horizon. Elizabeth is a coffee farmer. And she has 4,000 trees to take care of.

Along the impossibly steep and narrow road winding up to the village of Sanchirio Palomar, the only sounds are the rustling tree canopy and birdsong. It’s fitting, since the village’s name—a combination of Spanish and indigenous words—means “cold river with many birds.” With internet and reliable phone service only arriving last month, Sanchirio Palomar feels, at first, like a sleepy place where not much happens. But in reality, this remote Peruvian village pulses with ambition, creativity, and drive. Just ask Patricia. 

Maria Eufemia Madonado Ocaño holds a small leaf in her hands, mottled yellow where it should be vibrant and green. This leaf represents her livelihood, decimated by la roya—a fungus that develops when conditions are warmer and wetter than usual. The yellow spots are a symptom, but the disease is climate change.

Bertha Nzabanita, Rwandan coffee farmer and long-time member of the Musasa cooperative. One field. That’s all Bertha Nzabanita had left after the devastation of the Rwandan genocide left her a widow. One field, a young son to raise, and few options.

Root Capital and Investing in Women, an initiative of the Australian Government, are partnering to promote women’s economic empowerment in South East Asia by financing agricultural enterprises owned or led by women. Investing in Women has committed AUD 2 million to Root Capital for the initial, year-long phase of a planned ten-year program.

Driving along the winding dirt roads of Kenya’s central highlands, it doesn’t take long to spot scores of women farming in the mist. The Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that women perform 75 to 89 percent of the country’s agricultural labor. Yet all too often, this labor goes unrecognized.

This profile is part of a series that captures how Root Capital’s Gender Equity Grants are transforming the lives of rural women. Read more here.