It seems 2015 is shaping up to be the year of gender equity in specialty coffee. CQI is conducting research on the issue as part of the industry-driven Partnership for Gender Equity, and the SCAA has announced a Symposium session on gender equity–a good sign that this is an issue whose time has come. In […]
Kimberly Easson has been present at the creation of lots of noteworthy efforts to make the coffee trade more equitable. She was part of the original team that brought Fair Trade Certification to the U.S. coffee market in 1999 to create new market opportunities for smallolder farmers. In 2003, she co-founded the International Women’s Coffee […]
From 2008-2011, I was involved in a CRS coffee project in Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua called CAFE Livelihoods. In late 2008, I convened the project teams from each of the four countries for the first time in Managua. To open the first session, I paired each person with a colleague from another country […]
Last week Root Capital published this issue brief on gender lens investing in the coffeelands. I posted some reflections on that publication here, and made reference to the fact that men and women experience the world differently as a result of the social construct of their respective gender roles. The data we collected in Colombia […]
Back in February, Root Capital released a white paper on social and environmental performance management—the inaugural publication in a series of issue briefs on strategic insights the organization has gleaned from its work. Last week, Root published the second brief in the series—this one focused on gender lens investing—that is worth a closer look.
I have made my pre-conference picks for the highlights of the conference for anyone interested in the intersection between specialty coffee and development: lectures that seem to hold the most promise to illuminate some of the persistent challenges in the coffeelands — and some of the most promising approaches to addressing them. Biggest disappointment: nothing on the agenda about climate change and the threat it poses to specialty coffee.
