Driving opportunity for women in commodity value chains
Join our International Women’s Day webinar on Wednesday 8 March at 15:00 CET to explore how rural women can be supported to overcome the economic and social barriers that hold them back.
We’ll highlight the benefits of creating tailored economic opportunities for women smallholders that address their specific needs, reflecting this year’s theme of Embrace Equity. We are happy to have Under-Secretary-General of OSAA and UN Special Advisor on Africa, H.E. Ms Cristina Duarte as our Key note speaker. The co-founder of Colombian cocoa trader Colcocoa, Gabriela Alvarez will also be there to share the journey they traversed to empower rural women.
Colcocoa, which the CFC has invested in last year, promotes the inclusion and participation of women on cacao farms. This is a crucial initiative for Colombia, which ranks 75th in the Global Gender Gap Index. Colcocoa also worked with no name chocolate to write Latin American Women Who Dare, a book striving to inspire rural women and girls to overcome the barriers they face.
The discussion will draw on our broad experience of working in a variety of countries, communities and commodity value chains to address the challenges rural women face.
Last year we also invested in Kenyan agribusiness Exotic. Run by three female entrepreneurs it is the only women-led macadamia nuts processor and exporter in Kenya supplying high-quality nuts to international markets. A key part of Exotic’s purpose is empowering women smallholders to take advantage of opportunities in the sector that they may otherwise have struggled to access because of gender-related constraints.
To find out more about the potential of impact investing to drive gender equity alongside local development, join us on Wednesday 8 March at 15:00 by registering here.