Issue link: http://read.dmtmag.com/i/581281
30 STiR tea & coffee industry international / Issue 5, 2015 (October/November) Participants acting out gender balance trees at Partnership for Gender Equity Workshop in Nicaragua Photo courtesy of Coffee Quality Institute learned to strategy development" before develop- ing pilot projects in Stage 2. Participatory research and learning has been part of international development since the mid- 1990s. The idea behind this approach to develop- ment work is that the best way to improve a situa- tion is to find and use local knowledge. However, to do that, aid and development workers must establish trust with the individuals who have that knowledge. In the twenty-some years since this approach became popular, many participatory learning toolkits have been created by such organi- zations as ACDI/VOCA, Agri-Pro Focus, Hivos, the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture, Oxfam Novib, and the World Bank. Cecilia Su holds the position of Marilyn J. Git- tell Chair in Urban Studies at City University of New York. She also co-founded Kwah Dao, the Burmese refugee project which used a participa- tory model of community development. She took a cautionary tone when reflecting on her experi- ence using participatory learning tools. Su said, "Are we helping the less powerful while further marginalizing the least powerful? That's a crucial question. The [participatory mod- els] that work best spend as much in time and re- sources making sure that the process is not dom- inated by the local elites and that there is some diversity in participation." The exercises used in the PGE Stage 1 work- shops grew out of a participatory training pro- gram called the Gender Action Learning System (GALS). Facilitators used two primary GALS tools to explore men's and women's roles in daily life, and access to and control over farm and fam- ily assets and income. The workshops took place in Cauca, Colom- bia; Palacaguina, Nicragua; Mbale, Uganda; and, Takengon, Indonesia. Participants included 119 smallholder farmers (49 men and 68 women) from 40 producer organizations, most of which are fairtrade certified. The PGE report provides "top line findings" that echo similar work in non-coffee agricultural settings: women do not have equal access to income and assets or equal authority in decision-making; women experience "time poverty" in that they do more tasks over more hours than men and this con- tributes to their under-representation in leadership positions; and legal and cultural restrictions on economic interactions and travel hinder women's ac- cess to the rest of the supply chain. The particulars of how coffee production tasks, income, and assets might be better shared among men and women varied depending not only on the cultural background of participants, but also in some settings, by age. These findings, taken in combination with reading the World Bank Report and the SCAA white paper, reiterate the maxim: context does matter. Any discussion of gender equity anywhere in the world must touch on cultural, financial, geographical, historical, legal, and political domains. The obvious conclusion is that empowering women is anything but simple and must in- clude men. An uncomfortable subject All this attention on gender in the specialty coffee arena has not gone un- questioned. Nor are the issues that emerge when attempting to find a "way forward" easy to address. Aside from formal focus groups, Easson and others involved in PGE have led discussions at coffee forums all over the world in the past year. Many took place at the 2015 SCAA Expo and Symposium in Seattle last April. Some discomfort with the idea that roasters and retailers could or should engage in discussions about gender equity in producing countries with suppli- ers emerged in the Symposium Salon discussions following the Gender Equity: Can Shifting our Focus Improve the Coffee Supply Chain? presentation. Anunu at- tended both discussions and noted that the questions, "What is the reaction from the men? How do you deal with that?" was a major theme for one of those conversations. Anunu also reported two other common reactions she has encountered to being involved in this work: "We have our own gender problems in the Global North. Shouldn't we be working on our own problems?" and "What right do we have to go into other people's countries, communities and try to change them?" Her response was, "Any way we approach this process is going to be good because it is going to help people process how gender affects their lives." Numerous sources for this article emphasized a need to partner with oth- er organizations that have local expertise, including producer organizations. Fairtrade Africa is a producer organization that is part of the Fairtrade Inter- national system, one that has developed numerous programs to encourage gender mainstreaming changes in its member cooperatives. "The difficulty we have is how we can deal with this situation in coun- tries with different jurisdictions, with different colonial relations," said Chief Adam Tampuri. "Fairtrade approaches this problem by bringing the farmers all under one roof to build their capacity, to recognize the fact that women are equal to men, they are farmers, they deserve recognition, they can be credible leaders," he said. Fairtrade Africa has used asset transfer programs and leadership quotas with some success. For example, Kuapa Kokoo, a Fairtrade certified cocoa cooperative in Ghana, now requires that three of seven elected representa- tives are women, and that one of two delegates who attend the annual con- ference is a woman. As a result the number of women candidates in delegate elections nearly doubled in 2014. Data about better representation within trade organizations may come across to some as real progress. Others have concern that such measures reflect "gender-washing" and may represent temporary change. Backlashes