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Growing Coffee, Building a Household
Martha Gatobu, a small-scale coffee farmer in Kenya, exemplifies the benefits of investing in women farmers.
Women usually tend to the coffee trees that pepper the lush fields of Kenya's central highlands - one of the world's most fertile farming regions. But women rarely reap the returns. In the village of Maura, however, there is an exception. Her name is Martha.
A small-scale coffee farmer, this married mother of four has been maintaining a half-acre of coffee bushes for nearly two decades since she inherited the land from her father. She's an anomaly in that sense, since land ownership is traditionally passed on to men. But that custom is changing. "In the past, coffee was a man's crop, and women had no role whatsoever," Martha says. "Now you see women taking more leadership positions."
For Martha, that means earning income from the fields she maintains and having access to local growing cooperatives, through which all Kenyan coffee must, by law, be traded. Most cooperatives are dominated by men, but Martha is yet another exception in that she leads her own 29-member cooperative. She works with other women such as Rosemary Murangiri to increase their yields, improve the quality of their coffee beans and track their progress.
In developing countries, women like Martha do much of the work on farms - planting, harvesting and processing. The situation is no different in Kenya, where the majority of coffee produced here is exported.
For Martha, the money she earns from her coffee sales allows her to buy more nutritious food, better health care and school supplies for her children. Indeed, more communities worldwide recognize that women's contributions in agriculture not only increase crop yields, but also alleviate hunger and improve families' nutrition.
Such outcomes only further fuel Martha's motivation to succeed. "When a woman gets money, [she is] focused on specific things [she] wants to achieve," she says. "She can get it and spend it all on building a household."
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