Women in the coffee supply chain: Identifying challenges and opportunities in San Francisco de Opalaca and La Paz, Honduras

Companies face challenges despite the growing interest in investing in and measuring gender equality and women’s empowerment within supply chains. For one, they may be unclear about the tools that best fit their needs, given the number of frameworks, approaches, and tools that currently exist to support gender integration and programming (Mora et al., 2023). Another challenge is to better understand who are the various actors, women, and marginalized groups, involved in their supply chain. Currently, the lack of data—and specifically data that would allow us to know the different groups of women involved in the chain—makes it difficult to:
a. Understand women’s livelihoods, the diverse roles they play in supply chains, and the barriers to improving their performance in these chains.
b. Define actions aimed at increasing the benefits they could obtain from the chain (including economic empowerment).
c. Initiate adaptive learning within companies to achieve sustainable supply chains in different social and productive (or business) contexts.

To respond to this challenge, in Honduras, the exporting company Ofi, legally known in this country as Olam-Honduras, in collaboration with the Bioversity International Alliance and CIAT, implemented a methodology to characterize women involved in the production node of the coffee chain in two of the company’s supply zones. The construction of a typology made it possible to identify and analyze women with different experiences within the coffee chain, grouping them into types to guide gender actions in the company’s supply chain.
The approach of grouping or categorizing producers is not new to Ofi. The company has already used a similar approach (producer segmentation) to target the technical assistance it provides in Guatemala and Uganda (IITA & Olam, 2019). As detailed in Section 3, the methodology implemented in Honduras is based on the same principles, but uses and intersectional approach and focuses on women involved in the production node of the coffee supply chain.

Soto, F.; Rodriguez, R.; Gonzalez, S.