In southern Mexico, small-scale coffee farmers often join cooperatives to sell their harvests and benefit from potential price stability and services such as training or agricultural advice. Women who join coffee cooperatives are found to have higher levels of decision-making power, but also experience higher levels of time poverty that can limit their ability to expand or improve their coffee production or benefit from cooperative services.

In this post, we share results from a qualitative study—conducted by Cultural Practice LLC and the Mexican data collection firm Berman as part of IFPRI’s Applying New Evidence for Women’s Empowerment (ANEW) project—on the operation of two coffee cooperatives in the state of Chiapas, Mexico, supported by the NGO Root Capital. The study examined how that support helps advance women’s economic empowerment, among other objectives—finding that women producers are often limited in their ability to equally participate and benefit from cooperatives due to normative and structural barriers.

Root Capital was founded in 1999 to provide financing and business advisory services to small, growing agricultural enterprises like the ones in this study that need more than a microloan, but that commercial banks consider too remote or risky for investment. Since 2022, Root Capital has provided more than $2 million in loans between these two cooperatives and is poised to offer additional financing in the coming months.

The study

In June and July 2023, we conducted 21 individual interviews and nine group interviews with market actors, men and women coffee cooperative leaders, men and women cooperative members, wives of cooperative members, and Root Capital staff from two municipalities in Chiapas. English transcripts of the interviews were analyzed using thematic analysis in NVivo software. Our findings shed light on the gender roles, divisions of labor, and aspects of empowerment in coffee value chains in Chiapas, and how men and women coffee producers can participate in and benefit from their participation in coffee cooperatives.

Gender roles, divisions of labor, and aspects of empowerment

Defined gender roles and divisions of labor exist at each node of the coffee value chain in Chiapas. These include women’s significant contributions of unpaid labor to coffee production and post-harvesting activities, while men maintain control over decision-making and sales and negotiation. Participants often described these roles as defined by social norms or perceived gender-specific limitations of natural abilities shaping how men or women could engage in different activities—which can limit women’s efforts to expand and upgrade their roles in coffee value chain activities.

While men are in charge of coffee production activities and making decisions over these activities, women contribute to cleaning and management activities, and are heavily involved in coffee harvesting, which requires hard physical labor to pick and carry baskets of ripened cherries. Still, there is a perception that women cannot participate in other post-harvest activities, such as transporting bags of coffee, because this task is thought too physically demanding. Women are responsible for other time-consuming and laborious coffee processing activities. Men manage most coffee sales and negotiations with the buyer. If sales occur at the household, women can participate, under the direction of their husbands.

Overall, varying access to resources limits both men and women farmers’ ability to advance in the coffee value chain. For example, men and women both lack access to reasonable credit options, hindering their ability to hire additional coffee farm labor or to purchase equipment that would reduce women’s time burdens. In addition, women’s time use is constrained by expectations and normative tasks in ways that men are not constrained.

Status of women’s empowerment

In addition to providing credit and advisory services to agricultural cooperatives, Root Capital aims to increase women’s economic empowerment, so we investigated women’s and men’s understanding of the concept of empowerment. Overall, both men and women interviewed found the concept of an empowered person difficult to relate to. Instead, they shared perceptions of how relations between men and women had changed over time, acknowledging that respect for women’s rights has grown, noting that it was common to see both men and women participating in income-generating activities.

We also asked participants about their attitudes toward intimate partner violence. While both men and women said that men often mistreated their wives, they viewed the behavior differently. Women were likely to say they viewed it as a private matter, while men were more concerned with women’s reactions to mistreatment than the mistreatment itself.

Comparing cooperative members’ participation

Men and women cooperative members reported differences in their ability to engage in and benefit from their participation. One cooperative provided more opportunities for members to directly engage in meetings, social activities, and trainings, and was perceived as a source of support and community that advanced their production and post-harvesting activities. The other operated through a decentralized structure and did not offer members opportunities to participate in decision-making or meetings, as this was done only through their elected delegates.

Members perceived their cooperatives to be consistent and reliable coffee buyers that offered stable pricing compared to local coffee buyers and provided transportation options for producers to move their harvest to the point of sale—enabling women to have more engagement in coffee sales. However, women’s time burdens and the need for their husbands’ permission limit their full participation in both cooperatives.

Exploring Root Capital’s approaches to strengthening gender equity

Finally, we explored the extent to which Root Capital’s engagement with the cooperatives had supported activities or changes that strengthen women’s empowerment by asking members and leaders about their perceptions.

Many members were unaware of Root Capital and its engagement efforts; this is unsurprising, as Root Capital works only at the cooperative level and does not provide services direct to members. Some members knew that Root Capital had provided a loan to purchase and maintain a truck used to transport their coffee to the point of sale, allowing women a more active role in managing coffee sales. Cooperative leaders acknowledged other benefits from working with Root Capital, such as receiving loans that increased their transportation capacity and ability to pay their members quickly. Given that Root Capital only recently began implementing its formal Gender Equity Advisory services to cooperatives in Chiapas, there is limited data available both from our study and existing research on how these activities are influencing cooperative operations, gender dynamics and roles, or perceptions of women in the coffee value chain.

Recommendations and areas for future research

The study results suggest several recommendations and areas for future research:

• Evaluate the Gender Equity Advisory services’ influence on cooperative members, leaders, and operations.
• Continue evaluating the gendered impacts of all of Root Capital’s services and its credit plus capacity model. Establishing a baseline will be useful in this area, as Root Capital continues to refine and expand its Gender Equity Advisory services.
• Design additional research to address men’s and women’s needs for and options to access credit to advance their own goals.

Read more about these findings and suggestions for future research and recommendations in the full report.

Sarah Eissler is a Senior Research Associate with Cultural Practice, LLC; Deborah Rubin is a Director of Cultural Practice, LLC. This post is based on research that is not yet peer-reviewed. 

Funding for this study was provided by the Walmart Foundation.