News

Feminist & Fair: the gender-transformative innovation competition

09 March 2023
[GIZ / Jƶrg Bƶthling]
[GIZ / Jƶrg Bƶthling]

Promoting inclusion and social justice in agricultural supply chains while pursuing an intersectional approach – these were the key criteria for the winning projects in the gender-transformative innovation competition Feminist & Fair: The Future of Agricultural Supply Chains.

Feminist & Fair invited business-led consortia ā€“ consisting of at least one international company and a local implementing organization ā€“ to submit their ideas to dismantle systemic and normative inequalities that continue to inhibit equal participation and gains in agricultural supply chains.

The GIZĀ Global Programme ā€˜Sustainability and Value Added in Agricultural Supply Chainsā€™, on behalf of theĀ Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and DevelopmentĀ (BMZ), set up the initiative to put the newly proclaimed feminist development policy into practice and to support the empowerment of women and other marginalized groups, who work along agricultural supply chains. Looking through an intersectional lens, Feminist & Fair projects need to target the 3Rs – resources, rights, and representation ā€“ of feminist development policy while providing a direct link to one or multiple of the selected sustainable agricultural supply chains.

GrowHer: Kakao is one of the three projects that were selected as winners of the initiative. Approximately 32% (450,000) of Indonesiaā€™s cocoa smallholder producers are women, who suffer discrimination and inequality and are often denied recognition for their contribution to the global cocoa economy. GrowHer: Kakao is a project in collaboration with Mars, Save the Children and GrowAsia that aims to improve the rights of women and girls, strengthen their representation in the cocoa value chain, and accelerate access to resources and training for 4,000 women smallholders and entrepreneurs in South Sulawesi, Indonesia.

The two other winning projects of Feminist & Fair are currently in the final planning phase. Our Tea, Our Voice will work to ensure that tea farmers and workers in China, Kenya, Indonesia, and Rwanda can participate in the value chain on an equal, fair and productive basis. As part of the FairChain Farming: from outgrowers to ingrowers project, Moyee Coffee wants to implement a radically new and gender-transformative value-added approach in Ethiopia’s coffee supply chain.

All project activities will be implemented in collaboration with local partners over a period of three years and draw on support from the Centre for Feminist Foreign Policy (CFFP). Damjan Denkovski, CFFPā€™s Deputy Executive Director, summed up the progressive approach of the initiative beautifully:

ā€œthe Feminist & Fair Initiative marks an exciting milestone in feminist development policy [ā€¦] in developing actionable, transformative, and innovative solutions to ensure universal access to human rights across global agricultural supply chains using an explicitly decolonial, intersectional, and systemic approach.ā€

Interested to learn more about Feminist & Fair? Take a look at the website of the Initiative for Sustainable Agricultural Supply Chains to stay informed about the further progress of Feminist & Fair or get in touch with Valerie Minlend (Valerie.minlend@giz.de) or Beatrice Haller (Beatrice.haller@giz.de).

Link to further materials

Contact person
Beatrice Haller ā€” Advisor

Key buzzwords
Feminist development policy, agricultural supply chains, cacao, competition, business, social justice