ore female coffee growers in Kenya to take up leadership roles in farming cooperatives as part of its commitment to scaling up its business-related activities to promote gender equality and education for women and girls.The company has launched a programme to train more than 1,000 women in better agricultural practices at the same time as developing their confidence and business skills.
Nestlé is working with nine coffee cooperatives with the aim of seeing women hold at least one third of all leadership positions within them by 2015.
“Women do more than two thirds of the work involved in coffee farming in Kenya,” said Svetlana Obruchkova, Managing Director of Nestlé Kenya.
“However, fewer than 5% of leadership roles in coffee cooperatives in the country are currently held by women.
“We are encouraging them to move into leadership roles, so they can be adequately represented in decision making,” she continued.
Through the programme, we have identified a selection of women from each co-op and trained them to become ‘promoter farmers’, to take the knowledge and skills they’ve acquired back to their communities to educate their peers.”
