Central America and Mexico

Last week, Root Capital impact officer Asya Troychansky wrote about the transformative impact that Root Capital’s financial management training has had on ACMUV, an all-women microcredit and handcraft association in Guatemala. This week, Estuardo Fuentes Gutiérrez, our Guatemala-based impact liaison, shares a recent conversation with Margarita Chojolán, regional training coordinator in Central America, about how we adapted our typical training to better serve women– and what we learned in the process.

Juana Hu Mateo, general coordinator at ACMUV. “In my home, my father and my mother always valued my sister and me less than my brothers,” says Juana Hu Mateo, a 41-year-old from Guatemala’s indigenous Maya Ixil community. Despite her parents’ lack of support and community norms against women’s participation outside the home, Juana persevered to study, eventually finding work as a seasonal coffee sorter at Asociación Chajulense, a coffee cooperative and Root Capital client in the western highlands of Guatemala.

If you bought a cup of certified coffee recently, chances are high it might have been brewed using "shade-grown" beans. But what is shade-grown coffee exactly, and why is it important?

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.

Last month, we shared one of the findings from our recent multi-client impact study: that cooperative membership was associated with more widespread use of sustainable agricultural practices by farmers. Despite these signs of improvement, however, we also found that the overall use of sustainable agricultural practices remained limited. Most cooperative members reported using only a handful of the 10 sustainable agricultural practices examined in the study. When they did use these practices, members were often implementing them incorrectly or inconsistently from year to year, due to financial constraints or limited agronomic knowledge. 

Last month, we shared key findings from an impact study conducted with four Root Capital clients, coffee cooperatives in Guatemala. Together, these cooperatives provide market access for over 800 smallholder farmers, who generally own one to four hectares of land.