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No woman should have to choose between caring for her children and pursuing a fulfilling career. In this Kenyan village, working mothers found a way to do both.

In the misty Gayo highlands of northern Sumatra, Ibu Rahmah is making her mark on Indonesia’s coffee industry.

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.

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.

Root Capital staff, clients, and supporters during a recent trip to Colombia. Every day, I feel thankful for the chance my team and I have to grow prosperity for low-income communities around the world. We serve farming families living in some of the most difficult conditions imaginable — moms, dads, and grandparents raising kids, crops, livestock. We help foster the growth of agricultural businesses that organize and purchase the harvests of hundreds, often thousands, of local producers. We provide services to strengthen enterprises and help them custom fit to local realities. It’s a highly local thing, and I love that.

In past trips to visit Root Capital coffee clients in the “field,” I generally went to the actual field – that is, the coffee farm, where I was overseeing one impact study or another. When we’d get to a farmer’s home, we’d greet the woman of the house, and sometimes her daughter by her side, and off we’d go, usually with men, to visit the coffee plot and learn about the current production.

Despite the resurgence of interest and new investment in agricultural development, the supply of actionable data on the impacts of enterprises that work with smallholder farmers trails behind the demand. Our impact studies, launched in 2011 as a complement to the social and environmental metrics collected during due diligence, seek to help address the knowledge gap in the sector. In the studies, we examine the impacts that our clients, small and growing agricultural businesses, have on the livelihoods of smallholder farmers and on the environment, and we determine if and how our services increase the enterprises’ impacts. Today we’re excited to release our first multi-site impact study — Improving Rural Livelihoods: A Study of Four Guatemalan Cooperatives.

To kick off the celebration of our 15th anniversary, we’ve launched our 15 Voices blog series. The series is a collection of 15 interviews with some of Root Capital’s closest friends and allies who share our goal of growing rural prosperity and are helping us move toward our vision.

Q&A WITH ASYA TROYCHANSKY, ROOT'S IMPACT ASSESSMENT OFFICER. Asya Troychansky, Root Capital’s Impact Assessment Officer, recently returned from Guatemala where she has been overseeing Root Capital’s Cluster Study. 

About Us Agriculture is the key to unlocking a better future for billions of people. But while rural families sustain the world, they struggle to sustain themselves. At the same time, they face increasingly urgent challenges, from volatile crop prices to extreme weather. Root Capital is a social impact investor that provides financing and business training to agricultural enterprises so…