‘Coffee depends on women’: the gendered coffee paradox of Kenya’s coffee industry

Abstract

A “coffee paradox” – evident through the unequal political and social relations within coffee’s global value – as named by Benoit Daviron and Stefano Ponte (2005), created a “coffee boom” in consuming countries and a “coffee crisis” in producing countries. This paradox certainly exists, and my research takes their argument a step further. Using a feminist political economy perspective, informed by an intersectional feminist approach, I identify an additional paradox, which I name as the “gendered coffee paradox,” because while “coffee depends on women,” it remains a “man’s crop” through policies and practices that favour men and discriminate against women. Kenya’s complex coffee chain was created by the British government and European settlers during the colonial era (1880s to 1962). Yet, even after Kenya’s 1963 independence and significant gender advancements since Kenya’s 2010 Constitution, women in coffee experience gendered barriers. While colonialism discriminated against all Africans, it set up specific discriminations for the gendered disempowerment of women. As such, twenty-first century neoliberal approaches to “empower women in coffee,” as adopted by global and national institutions, as well as the specialty coffee industry, fail to address entrenched structures of gender inequity and women’s intersectional challenges. Through my field work in the Republic of Kenya, I present a case study centred on a Kenyan coffee estate, Chepsangor Hills Coffee, and on interviews with both leaders and farmers throughout Kenya’s coffee industry, to showcase women’s continued challenges regarding land ownership, income gaps, and time poverty (the “double burden”). The study also highlights several examples of ways Kenyan women utilize business and nonprofit initiatives, seeking empowerment for themselves and their communities. My study suggests that “accompaniment,” as a relational approach premised on mutuality, may be an alternative to “empowerment.”