Exploring gender roles and women’s empowerment in the coffee value chain and coffee cooperatives: Evidence from Mexico

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.