In Your Words

In my country, Turkey, half of the population is women, but women's workforce participation is only 28% and only 1% of land belongs to women. Women have great difficulty getting the financing to create a business. When I created the BigChefs restaraunt brand and experienced tremendous growth, I said that it's time to give back. We include women in our supply chain, buying ingredients directly from them and encouraging women entrepreneurs. We promote them in our social media accounts and put their photos in the menus. This helps new women entrepreneurs producing our honey, our goat cheese or even the aprons our waiters wear to gain self-confidence as they're earning money. We see them owning their own companies and creating partnerships.

If you change a woman's world, the family's world changes. When we can change all the families, all the villages, it's a big impact. “Woman” is everything. Mother is everything in a family. If women and men were equal in employment and salary, that would add more than the US and Chinese economies combined to the global economy. If we had gender equality, we would solve hunger and poverty. Gender equality is the biggest issue for the 2030 SDGs.

Read more about SUPRACAFE in Gamze's IB Voices piece

In 1990, when we founded SUPRACAFE as a company specializing in the production, processing and marketing of high-quality coffees, it was clear to me that our value generation model should be based mainly on direct work with producers to build quality. That is why we established a strategic alliance with the coffee growers’ cooperatives of Colombia, through its exporting company EXPOCAFE.

In one of my visits to the coffee growers’ cooperative the manager introduced me to a small group of women. Their message to me was: “We need help to provide for our families; our husbands have died or been displaced by war and we, who are now the household heads, want to grow coffee to earn the necessary income to support our families”.

From this moment, what I call our ‘partnership’ grew. I use the term partner because for SUPRACAFE, the work that we have been doing from this point forwards with members of the Association of Coffee Growing Women of Cauca (AMUCC) is a partnership; a society that seeks the generation of shared value. By helping them to produce their coffee, we have been able to strengthen our supply chain with a high quality supplier.

Read more about SUPRACAFE's empowering partnership strategy in Ricardo's IB Voices piece

Every year, L’OCCITANE orders several hundred tons of shea butter directly to cooperatives of women.

This means that the women who produce it have a stable source of income, enabling them to enjoy better living conditions. The majority of these women contribute to household expenses and 75 percent have been able to enroll their children in school. With our local team based in Burkina Faso, we’ve worked with cooperatives of women to obtain organic and fair-trade certification, which add to the value of their produce. Our contracts are multiannual and non –exclusive. We encourage them to trade with other clients and develop activities that are not necessarily shea related to obtain independence.

In 2018, we launched a 2 million dollars project for 3 years, the RESIST Programm based on 3 pillars :

- Natural resource protection,

- Sustainability of the shea butter process

- Revenues’ diversification,

We are constantly asking ourselves whither what we’re doing is the right thing, whether our actions male sense locally. That’s is why it’s so important to let the women “take over” this project to a certain extent. The initiative may have come from L’OCCITANE, but it’s up to them to make it work for them and fit their needs, so it’s something that will really help them – not just now, but over the long term.

Read more about L'OCCITANE's impact in Justine's IB Voices piece

Impact is built into our business model. We work with smallholders and women's processing groups to help them add value to their own cashews. Improving productivity gives them time to do other things, to take care of the kids, take care of the family, take care of their farms. Another impact is that kids go to school instead of having to contribute family labor to this work. Engaging women is important when we talk about development because women are the cornerstone of communities and of households. Women want to be able to send kids to school, to build a home and provide for their families. These are the kinds of things that have a huge impact on the community.

Read about Fahad's plans to use blockchain technology to connect consumers with producers and make the whole value chain transparent in this interview