The Rural Women’s Assembly (RWA) is one of the world’s most innovative and dynamic social movements. RWA is an independent and self-organized network of small-scale women farmers and peasant producers from across the Southern Africa region. In 2009, 250 women came together and established RWA with the slogan Guardians of Land, Life and Love. A decade later, with a membership of over 150,000 women, their chant has been expanded to Guardians of Land, Life, Seeds and Love.
RWA is firmly rooted in struggles to protect local seeds and local knowledge against corporate capture. They fight for land, climate justice and food sovereignty and against all forms of patriarchy, working to build conscious women’s leadership and confidence to stand up and speak for themselves.
In 2020, RWA embarked on a seed journey across seven of its ten member countries – eSwatini, Lesotho, Malawi, South Africa, Zambia and Zimbabwe – to audit which local seeds its members had in their possession. This initiative ran over nearly two and a half years, despite the Covid-19 pandemic.
‘The guardianship of local seeds allows plants to thrive without toxic inputs and away from corporate control’
One significant outcome of that journey was the identification of over 500 RWA seed guardians who play an important and often unrecognized role in preserving seed. Another outcome was the uncovering of local seeds that were on the verge of extinction due to extreme climate change – droughts, floods and cyclones – and aggressive corporate practices and government policies which did not favour rural small-scale farmers’ protection of local seeds.
The Southern African guardians have saved seeds for decades. Their mothers and grandmothers had saved seeds passed across generations to preserve a social practice that, besides having cultural significance, ensures food sovereignty. The guardianship of local seeds allows plants to thrive without toxic inputs and away from corporate control, contributing to defending biodiversity and overcoming environmental and social crises in a region devastated by the convergence of climate change and failed market-driven policies.
The Seed Guardians’ exhibition
As a follow-up to the seed audit research project initiated in 2020, RWA proposed to three researchers to produce a documentary photography exhibition. This exhibition aims at giving expression to and recognition of RWA members as key protagonists of their own herstories and seed narratives. It offers an insight into the changing landscape (political, socioeconomic, cultural and environmental) of a region under-researched and stereotyped, shining a spotlight onto the women who hold, care and share seeds in harmony with the environment in sustainable ways.
The photo exhibition serves as a window to the lives and struggles of the seed guardians of the Rural Women’s Assembly (RWA). It documents their invaluable contribution to food and seed sovereignty and struggle to ensure the recognition of women small-scale farmers, peasants and producers in policy frameworks that protect the rights to seed, land and food.
The seed guardians and the seeds themselves tell multiple and often overlapping stories: endurance and resilience; struggles for land; complex social relations and patriarchy in rural areas; gender-based violence; migration, labour patterns and social discord; climate change; rural food systems and work that provides, feeds and nurtures local livelihoods. In many ways, the seed embodies the struggle for freedom, autonomy and sovereignty of rural women, small-scale farmers and peasant producers. It is a testimony to the unseen daily work being done by RWA and its significant contribution to ensuring and enhancing biodiversity, social reproduction and rural economies.
The exhibition gives a concrete face to the seed guardian, where she comes from and how she sustains life, her family, her community and the planet. It seeks to depict not a static context nor a one-dimensional view, challenging the usual portrayal of a rural woman as helpless and poverty-stricken. The pride of the seed guardian is evident when she tells her story of how protecting the local seeds has enabled her to send her children to school, build her home and become economically self-reliant.
‘… the seed embodies the struggle for freedom, autonomy and sovereignty of rural women, small-scale farmers and peasant producers.’
The images and texts celebrate the quiet and silent activism of the RWA seed guardians and the seeds they hold. Each seed protected, harvested and sown is not necessarily perceived by the guardian as some big political act against big agribusiness, but is a small stone in the boot that is trying to control the African countryside. Each individual act of the seed guardian becomes a collective wave of solidarity across the region.
The photo exhibition is a window to the lives and struggles of almost 600 seed guardians in seven countries. It has been conceived as a tool that contributes to the advocacy efforts of the Rural Women’s Assembly, based on the direct involvement of RWA members in all the stages of research fieldwork and design and management of the exhibition.
The exhibition supports RWA’s efforts to influence public policy in a political context in which the right to save seeds is denied, with the guardians constantly facing the risk of prosecution for infringing seed patents. The images and texts that make up the exhibition aim to show who the custodians of the food system are, highlighting the resistance to the corporate takeover of land, the enclosure of farmers-managed seeds and the loss of agrobiodiversity.
In summary, the photo-documentary exhibition has four objectives:
Make the contribution of the women seed guardians in Southern Africa to food sovereignty visible.
Provide counterhegemonic narratives to the view that large-scale, technology-driven and corporate-controlled seeds are the only guarantee for the reliable supply of food across the world.
Demonstrate that seed sovereignty rests with local seed guardians, who are mainly women small-scale farmers, peasants and producers, in Africa and throughout the Global South.
Engage with policy frameworks that protect the rights to seed, land and food, such as UNDROP (UN Declaration on the Rights of Peasants); UNDRIP (UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People) and civil society-driven campaigns around the Right to Food and the UN Binding Treaty on Transnational Corporations and Human Rights.
Opinions expressed in Bliss posts reflect solely the views of the author of the post in question.
About the authors:
Donna Andrews
Donna Andrews is a Senior Researcher at the Ethics Lab, Neuroscience Institute in the Department of Medicine, University of Cape Town and ISS MA alumna.
Daniel Chavez
Daniel Chavez is a Senior Researcher at the Transnational Institute in the Netherlands and an ISS MA and PhD alumnus.
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As the world marks the International Year of the Woman Farmer, it is worth asking how far our financing models actually go in recognising women’s labour, leadership, and power in Africa’s commodity value chains. Financing agriculture in developing economies is never just a technical exercise, it is a political one. My work with the Common Fund for Commodities (CFC) revealed how capital shapes who participates, whose labour is visible, and whose power remains constrained. This blog uses the Agricultural Commodity Transformation (ACT) Fund as a lens to examine what its gender ambitions reveal about the possibilities and limits of financing gender‑inclusive transformation.
Photo Credit: Bliss Blog
Working with the Common Fund for Commodities (CFC) exposed me to the complexities of financing agriculture in developing economies. Across the development sector, I have seen many initiatives that claim to address structural challenges in global commodity value chains. One of the most ambitious is the Agricultural Commodity Transformation (ACT) Fund, a US$75 million+ impact fund launched by the Common Fund for Commodities (CFC), focusing on Africa (70%), Latin America and Asia. On paper, it is ambitious, channeling blended finance into small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) that connect millions of smallholder farmers in Africa, Latin America and Asia to global value chains, while building resilience against climate change. What stood out to me, however, was its gender ambition, its promise to make gender not an afterthought, but a guiding principle.
The ACT Fund explicitly states that it wants to move women from being invisible laborers in commodity value chains to recognized leaders, owners, and decision-makers. That claim made me pause and ask: what does this transformation really look like in practice, and what does it tell us about how finance intersects with gender justice in ? This blog reflects what I have learned so far, and the tensions between ambition and practice in financing gender-inclusive agricultural transformation.
The Weight Women Carry in Agriculture
However, feminist political‑economy research has shown, for decades, that their labour is systematically undervalued. Scholars like Bina Agarwal and Cheryl Doss have also noted that land regimes, inheritance systems, and institutional norms keep women’s work central to production but peripheral to power. And because women often do not. As a result, they face slower access to new technologies, exclusion from cooperatives, and remain underrepresented in leadership positions. The statistics are sobering and only confirm what women farmers already know. The World Economic Forum estimates that, at the current pace, gender parity in economic participation is 169 years away — and agriculture widens that gap further. This is the backdrop to the International Year of the Woman Farmer: a global acknowledgement that women sustain food systems while navigating structural constraints that financing alone cannot fix. And so, when the ACT Fund places gender at the center of its design, it signals recognition that the commodity sector cannot achieve sustainable transformation while half of its workforce is systematically disadvantaged. But it also raises a harder question: what does it mean to finance gender‑inclusive transformation when the very systems that shape access, ownership, and visibility are unequal by design?
Financing beyond numbers
What I found interesting is that ACT is not just a pot of money. It is structured as a blended finance vehicle: CFC contributes US$20 million in “first-loss” capital, essentially absorbing the highest risks, in order to attract follow-on investors. Average financing sizes range from US$ 2 million to US$5 million and target agri-SMEs that act as aggregators for thousands of smallholders. Agri-SMEs are the backbone of Africa’s food economy and according to the African Development Bank , 65% of food produced, aggregated, and distributed across the continent is handled by SMEs, which also manage 90% of all trade in African economies and provide 80% of total jobs in sub-Saharan Africa.
Yet, SMEs consistently cite access to affordable credit as their biggest barrier to growth. By deliberately embedding gender criteria into project selection, using the 2X Challenge indicators on female leadership, ownership, and employment, the ACT Fund is attempting to channel capital where it has historically been absent by identifying SMEs that either already demonstrate gender-inclusive policies or hold strong potential to achieve them.
Trade Opportunities, Unequal Gains
The launch of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) promised to expand intra-African trade, but not all farmers and SMEs benefit equally. Intra-African trade stands at just 14.4% of total African exports. Coffee and cocoa illustrate both the scale of African agricultural production and the structural barriers to value addition. Coffee exports alone were valued at over US$3.6 billion in 2022, while Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana exported cocoa products worth nearly US$4.8 billion and US$1.8 billion respectively that same year — yet the continent captures only a fraction of the full value chain. In Middle and Western Africa, most countries earn over 80% of their export revenues from primary commodities, and Africa’s exports remain predominantly unprocessed, while imports consist largely of food products, and this reveals a structural imbalance that AfCFTA was designed, but has so far struggled, to reverse.
This is the paradox of Africa’s commodity economy: the continent is export volumes are growing, but not necessarily creating more dignified work or fairer opportunities, especially for women, whose labour is concentrated in the lowest‑value segments of these chains. AfCFTA’s promise of regional integration will only translate into gender‑responsive transformation if countries move beyond exporting raw materials and invest in processing, standards, and competitiveness. The ACT Fund’s emphasis on value addition is an attempt to intervene in this structural gap. But whether these investments produce gendered gains, not just higher export volumes, depends on how rigorously outcomes are monitored, and whether women’s roles in processing, ownership, and decision‑making are made visible rather than assumed.
Counting what Counts
One of the practical challenges in this space is measuring gender impact. The CFC often relies on self‑reported data from SMEs to track how many women are leaders, employees, or smallholders benefiting from a project. However, feminist political economy scholars like Naila Kabeer and agricultural gender researchers such as Cheryl Doss have long argued that counting women is not the same as understanding gendered outcomes. Numbers can tell us who is present, but they cannot show who has power, who controls income, whose labour is unpaid, or how different groups of women experience a project. This is why number‑based gender reporting is widely recognised as a blunt instrument.
These micro‑level realities, the ones that determine whether women’s lives actually change, are precisely what headcounts erase. A project may report that “1,290 women benefited,” but that number cannot reveal whether women were landowners or labourers, whether they had decision‑making power, whether their workloads increased, or whether they were shielded from price shocks. In commodity sectors, where financing structures shape who bears risk and who captures value, these distinctions matter. Without them, gender reporting risks becoming a numerical exercise that obscures more than it reveals. The foregoing are a reflection of the broader methodological challenges that all impact‑oriented financiers face when working with SMEs in data‑constrained environments.”
My Takeaway
Reflecting on this, I am struck by the tension between ambition and practice. The ACT Fund represents a serious effort to bring gender to the forefront of agricultural finance — not as an afterthought, but as a design principle. Yet, the realities on the ground remind us that finance alone cannot dismantle systemic barriers like discriminatory land laws, gender-biased norms, or unequal household power dynamics. For me, the lesson is this: gender-lens investing can open doors, but transformation requires more than just capital. It demands sustained policy reforms, shifts in social norms, and accountability mechanisms that ensure women are not only visible as producers but also influential as leaders.
Planting Seeds for the Future
By 2030, the vision is for women in Africa’s commodity sectors to hold leadership positions, earn fair incomes, and influence how agricultural enterprises grow. If this vision is realised, it will not just reshape markets, it will reshape communities. But to get there, governments, investors, and consumers alike must move beyond rhetoric to action.
One practical way to move from rhetoric to action is to make gender‑based reporting a standard requirement in agricultural financing, especially in commodity sectors where capital flows often obscure who actually benefits. A range of established tools already exist to help projects do this work, not as bureaucratic checklists, but as mechanisms for making women’s labour, authority, and constraints visible to financiers. Institutions such as FAO and IFAD require sex‑disaggregated data on training, inputs, and income distribution. FAO’s Gender Equality Policy (2020–2030) offers practical tools for identifying gender gaps in agriculture, including Gender‑Lex — a database of national policies — and Country Gender Assessments, which highlight disparities in access to resources, services, and employment and provide clear recommendations for gender‑responsive action. Tools like the Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI), go further by tracking decision‑making power and time‑use, revealing how women’s participation is often sustained by unpaid labour that financing models rarely account for. IFAD’s Results and Impact Management System (RIMS) and frameworks such as CARE’s Gender Marker and Oxfam’s GEM approach shift attention to institutional change, who controls income, who sits on committees, and whether cooperatives adopt gender‑responsive governance. These tools matter for a simple reason: without gender‑based reporting, financing institutions like the CFC cannot see whether their investments are reinforcing existing inequalities or enabling women to move into positions of authority within commodity value chains. Reporting does not guarantee transformation, but it creates the minimum visibility required for accountability, ensuring that capital does more than circulate; it reshapes the terms on which women participate in Africa’s commodity transformation. Perhaps the most powerful framing comes from the CFC itself: the ACT Fund plants seeds of opportunity in the hands of African women. The real question, and one I continue to reflect on, is whether the soil of policy, finance, and society will allow those seeds to flourish. For taking that step and attempting to embed gender awareness into commodity finance, the CFC deserves recognition.
Opinions expressed in Bliss posts reflect solely the views of the author of the post in question.
About the author:
Emaediong Akpan
Emaediong Akpan is a legal practitioner called to the Nigerian Bar in 2015, with a Master’s in Consumer Protection Law and a Master’s in Development Studies from the International Institute of Social Studies. Her work sits at the intersection of law, gender equity, and development policy, with a focus on accountability, digital governance, and the structural inequalities shaping development outcomes. With extensive experience in the development sector, she has worked on gender equality, social inclusion, and policy advocacy initiatives across institutional and research contexts. Her interests include examining how law, technology, and feminist policy approaches can strengthen protections and create safer digital environments.
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In this blog, Olawale Fathiah Olamide, of the Humanitarian Observatory for Central and Eastern Europe, and the Centre of Migration Research, University of Warsaw, dives into the ways in which local actors co-define humanitarian governance through their interactions with international humanitarian ‘experts’. During the COVID-19 pandemic, and Cholera epidemic responses in Lagos, Nigeria, local health educators took an important role as ‘translators’ of international scientific knowledge to make it relevant for people in their everyday lives. The blog ends with a call to include local actors as active participants in sector-wide reform efforts, rather than simply as passive implementing partners.
“Experts” usually arrive on planes with clipboards and standardised plans based on international best practices. They provide the “what” and the “how” based on this expertise. But in the busy, high-pressure environment of Lagos, a sprawling megacity in southwest Nigeria, where over 20 million residents hustle for a living amidst narrow streets and vibrant markets, the “how” and the “why” in practice come from a different group: local health educators.
As a final-year health education student at the University of Lagos and a local resident, I experienced the quiet tension of the COVID-19 pandemic and the sudden alarm of recent cholera outbreaks. Volunteering at the grassroots level through the Health Education Students Association of Nigeria, an association for public health education students for health mobilisation, I observed that we are not merely “implementing partners” hired to check off boxes. We are the “experts from below” who turn cold science into the warm language of community trust.
The Myth of the “Implementing Partner”
The traditional humanitarian model views local staff as the last link in a chain, the people who distribute flyers or set up wash stations. This often leads to accusations of ‘risk dumping’, and of presenting extractive relationships as equal partnerships. This view also dangerously limits the agency, expertise, and knowledge of national partners. When a Cholera outbreak strikes a community on the Lagos Mainland, an international protocol might dictate the distribution of chlorine tablets. But as a local health educator, my expertise begins where the protocol ends. I know that in a particular neighbourhood, people will not use those tablets because of a long-standing rumour about their effects on fertility or because the taste reminds them of a poorly handled previous intervention. My role was not just to “implement” the distribution; it was to redesign the approach in real time. Rather than simply handing out tablets with a leaflet, we worked through community leaders, the people residents already trusted. In their own language, we explained the precise components of the chlorine tablets, how they worked, andwhat they did not do. We addressed the fertility rumour head-on, breaking downthe science in terms that were accessible and credible within that specific cultural context. Those leaders took the tablets publicly themselves, demonstrating their safety by example. This act of visible, trusted endorsement did more than any poster or protocol ever could. This is humanitarian governance in its most basic form, making decisions that determine whether an intervention lives or dies at the doorstep.
COVID-19: Navigating the Currency of Trust
During the COVID-19 mobilisation, the challenge was not just the virus; it was the “infodemic” and the deep-seated scepticism toward directives from above. The National Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) led the national response with evidence-based guidelines on social distancing and mask-wearing. However, I remember standing in local markets, realising that the standard posters about social distancing seemed like they were made for another world entirely. In a city where the “hustle” is essential and space is limited, telling a trader to stay home without a safety net feels less like health advice and more like a threat. As volunteers at the grassroots level, we did not simply repeat the NCDC’s guidelines; we negotiated them, and we listened to their fears to find a middle ground. We looked for the gaps where the official story failed to match the daily reality of Lagosians, and we spoke with them, acknowledging that while the virus was a risk, so was hunger. We acted as mediators, humanising the response by acknowledging both economic fears and fear of the virus. We were not just “mobilising”; we were adjusting the response to fit the city’s human landscape. Together with community members, we co-created a set of practical adaptations grounded in their daily reality. We reiterated the core guidelines, but we reframed them around what mattered most to the people in front of us. We were candid about the dangers of non-compliance, not in a way that felt like a threat, but as a genuine appeal, that health is greater than wealth, and that losing one’s health meant losing the ability to work at all. Crucially, we did not ask people to choose between their safety and their livelihood; instead, we showed them how to run their businesses while following the guidelines, making compliance feel possible, rather than punishing. These were not adaptations handed down from above, they were built in conversations with the very people they were meant to serve.
Cholera: The Expert Knowledge of the Streets
In the Cholera response, the expertise from below was even more detailed. Outbreak response is often seen as a logistical challenge, but in Lagos, it is a social one. While experts analysed data on a screen, we were on the ground identifying the specific water vendors who earned the community’s trust. I recall times when our intervention worked not because we had better medicine, but because we knew which community leader should be the first to drink the treated water in public. This is not support work; it is strategic leadership. We understand the power dynamics, the religious nuances, and the informal networks that international organisations often overlook. We realise that a health message in Lagos is only as strong as the person delivering it.
Shifting the Arena
The Hague Humanitarian Studies Centre highlights the need for “locally led” Observatories. My experience indicates that these observatories already exist; they are found in the weekly meetings of health educators in Akoka, Yaba, and beyond. If the humanitarian sector is serious about reform, it must stop seeing us as the final link in its chain. We are the first responders and the permanent residents. We do not just “act” in the humanitarian space; we shape it. It is time to understand that the most skilled expert is not always the one with an international degree – often it is the one who knows how to make a mother in a crowded Lagos street feel safe enough to trust the cure.
To learn more about the official response efforts:
Lagos State Ministry of Health: Follow org for updates on state-specific interventions and emergency hotlines.
Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC): Visit gov.ng for national situation reports and public health advisories.
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This blog is part of the ‘Humanitarian Observatories: Building a Knowledge and Advocacy Network on Humanitarian Governance’. This project has received funding from the European Union under the Horizon European Research Council (ERC) Proof of Concept.
Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or European Research Council Executive Agency (ERCEA). Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.
This blog post is part of a Women’s Month series marking the International Year of the Woman Farmer, drawing from interviews with Mary Portillo, Yuri Tabora, and Araceli Peraza,women working at the Capucas agricultural cooperative. Their narratives show that real transformation requires more than visibility; it depends on the institutional scaffolding that shapes who gets to lead, learn and belong. By tracing how organizations create (or fail to create) the structures that make women’s leadership possible, their experiences offer insights others can learn from.
Photo Credit: BlIss Team
March brings its familiar rituals of recognition – Women’s Month, International Women’s Day and this year, the International Year of the Woman Farmer. But visibility, however welcome, is not the same as transformation. What matters is how institutions redesign themselves so that women’s leadership is not symbolic but structurally supported.
In this blog post, we share the experiences of women working within an agricultural cooperative—not to spotlight individual resilience, but to understand the organizational conditions that make their progress possible. The three narratives trace how scaffolding operates inside the institution – not as charity or exceptional support, but as the architecture through which organizations decide who enters, who advances and who is recognized as a long‑term actor. The everyday experiences of these women reveal the institutional practices that often remain invisible in public celebrations of women’s contributions. Their trajectories show what it takes for the Women’s Month to move beyond recognition and toward structural change.
Institutional trust as a gendered resource: “My job is my joy, not a duty.”
Mary’s account illustrates how women’s entry into agricultural institutions is shaped not by individual deficits but by structural conditions. She begins with no experience and describes the uncertainty of her early days – ‘I didn’t know what to say, or what to do at the beginning’ – a pattern well‑documented in feminist agrarian scholarship, where women often enter from the periphery without the apprenticeship networks or inherited confidence that men accumulate through generational participation (Agarwal, 1994). What distinguishes her trajectory is the institution’s refusal to treat this uncertainty as a limitation.
Instead of demanding long histories of competence before allowing women to be seen, the cooperative practices what Cornwall and Edwards (2010) describe as anticipatory trust. Mary was invited to the national barista championship within her first year, a high‑stakes opportunity typically reserved for more experienced workers. When she expressed doubt – ‘I felt I wasn’t ready’ – leadership intervenes not with encouragement alone, but with structural risk‑sharing. The general manager reframes the competition as learning rather than performance, a move Ely and Meyerson (2000) identify as a gender‑responsive organizational practice that lowers the penalties for inexperience and signals that the institution will absorb uncertainty alongside her. This is not benevolence; it is a deliberate redistribution of opportunity and risk.
Her progression is sustained by a collective infrastructure of support – ´from the cleaning personnel to the management´ – reflecting what cooperative studies describe as horizontal learning cultures that counteract the isolation women often face in technical roles. Her long hours of preparation are not framed as individual perseverance but as shared labour, with colleagues investing time, skill and confidence in her development. The outcomes of this institutional culture are concrete: national championships, international representation and certification as the only woman barista instructor in Honduras. She attributes this trajectory to a workplace where others ‘trust me more than I do myself,´ a perfect example of institutional scaffolding of self‑trust – the process through which organizational belief precedes and shapes women’s confidence in their own expertise.
In the context of the International Year of the Woman Farmer, Mary’s account demonstrates that supporting women is not a matter of recognition but of structure: early investment, reduced penalties for inexperience, and distributed training creates the conditions under which women’s advancement becomes predictable rather than exceptional.
Feminist organizational scholars like Ely and Meyerson (2000) show that when workplaces reduce gendered penalties, share risk and actively scaffold women’s learning, women demonstrate higher retention and deeper organizational loyalty than men in comparable conditions; this is not framed as personality but as structural reciprocity, and ten years on, Mary’s continued presence – captured in her own words, ‘My job is my joy, not a duty´. This affirms the argument of Meyerson and Fletcher (2000) and Wittenberg‑Cox (2013) : when organizational systems finally work for women rather than against them, women do not simply remain, they become the most enduring and stabilizing force those institutions have.
Institutional scaffolding and the making of technical authority
Capucas Staff Training
Like Mary, Yuri joined the Capucas cooperative without professional experience, newly out of high school, and was immediately placed into a Heifer International–Capucas food security project in remote Celaque communities. As she explained, ‘in this area there were no roads to access these communities, so I had to walk one and a half to two hours to reach them, only by foot.´
Feminist agrarian scholars such as Agarwal (1994) and Razavi (2009) note that this kind of community‑embedded labour is routinely feminized: institutions rely on women to absorb the physical and logistical burdens of rural mobility while treating such effort as ordinary rather than structurally demanding. Her initial preference for a less demanding role is dismissed, and the cooperative president insists that she is needed on the project and will receive technical assistance.
This reflects what is often called anticipatory trust, the organizational practice of extending belief in a woman’s potential before she has accumulated the credentials typically required. It shows that organizations can reproduce inequality unless they intentionally redistribute opportunity, as Capucas does by placing a young woman in a role normally reserved for more senior men.
The cooperative’s commitment to training and guidance constitutes structured support, the third component of scaffolding, where inexperience becomes a site of institutional investment rather than a justification for exclusion. Yuri’s father’s guidance in navigating the terrain complements this institutional scaffolding, illustrating Kabeer’s (1999) insight that women’s agency is shaped by the interplay of household resources and organizational opportunity. Yuri’s account therefore demonstrates how scaffolding operates across institutional and familial levels to create a pathway into technical work for a young woman who initially sought something smaller and safer.
Yuri’s progression into leadership at the organic fertilizer plant shows how scaffolding deepens over time and produces women’s technical authority. After a year in the field, she is sent to a major coffee exporter for capacity building–an explicit investment in her skills. This skill‑building can be viewed as structural empowerment, where women’s technical competence is cultivated rather than presumed absent. When she is later asked to lead Capucas’s new organic fertilizer plant and hesitates, citing lack of knowledge, the cooperative does not interpret her doubt as disqualification. Instead, it engages in what Rao and Kelleher (2005) describe as institutional risk‑sharing: the organization absorbs uncertainty by sending her to Colombia and Peru to study ongoing projects and learn best practices, rather than expecting her to demonstrate readiness in advance. This sequence–early placement in a demanding role, targeted training, external exposure and shared responsibility for risk–embodies gender‑responsive organizational redesign, where institutions actively reshape opportunity structures to counteract gendered exclusions. Her simultaneous identity as a small‑scale coffee producer, rooted in a 200‑year regional tradition of land inheritance and community economic activity, underscores how women’s agricultural labour is embedded in both cultural continuity and institutional opportunity. Yuri’s eventual confidence and satisfaction in the role are thus not framed as individual exceptionalism but as the predictable outcome of a system that invested in her learning, mobility and technical authority.
Scaffolding as institutional design
Araceli’s trajectory shows scaffolding not as a response to difficulty but as the quiet architecture through which institutions decide who gets to enter, grow and matter. She begins at twenty through a programme created for the children of producers–a structured pipeline that signals intentional inclusion rather than discretionary benevolence. Acker’s work on gendered organisations reminds us that such pipelines do not emerge accidentally; they reflect institutions that have already reworked their opportunity structures so that young women are not peripheral but expected. Araceli’s rapid promotion from auxiliary to Manager of Traceability within a year is treated as normal, not exceptional. This is what Cornwall and Edwards describe as anticipatory trust, but it also echoes Bourdieu’s point that institutions reproduce themselves by recognizing and cultivating certain forms of potential. Here, the cooperative is not waiting for women to ‘prove´ readiness; it is actively constructing the conditions under which readiness becomes possible.
Araceli’s educational pathway makes the scaffolding even more visible. While completing a US‑based master’s degree in agricultural business–delivered virtually through a cost‑free collaboration between the cooperative and the national university–she works with flexible hours and sustained organizational support. As Rao and Kelleher remind us, ‘transformative change requires altering the deep structures that reproduce gender inequality within organisations.´ Their argument is visible here: institutional transformation requires organizations to adjust their internal rhythms to women’s life courses, and Araceli’s experience shows what this looks like in practice–scaffolding as temporal alignment, where institutional time bends to accommodate women’s educational and professional growth.
Araceli’s pathway reveals scaffolding as institutional design rather than individual assistance: a pipeline that brings young women in, accelerated trust that moves them forward, and organizational rhythms that expand rather than constrain their possibilities. As the closing narrative, her trajectory widens the analytic frame. Scaffolding here is not simply what institutions do to help women navigate difficulty; it is how they build futures, redistribute possibility and align their structures with the evolving lives of the women they claim to serve.
Conclusion
Taken together, these narratives show that women’s advancement in agriculture is not a matter of individual resilience but of institutional design. Scaffolding appears in different forms–emotional and technical accompaniment, risk‑sharing and the construction of authority, and the redesign of organizational pipelines and rhythms. Across these trajectories, the pattern is clear: women rise when institutions shift around them, altering the deep structures that reproduce inequality. This is the work the International Year of the Woman Farmer calls for. If the year is to be more than symbolic recognition, it must anchor a broader commitment to redesigning agricultural institutions so that women’s leadership is not exceptional but expected. Scaffolding is not the celebration; it is the infrastructure that makes the celebration meaningful.
Opinions expressed in Bliss posts reflect solely the views of the author of the post in question.
About the authors:
Mary Portillo
Mary Portillo has served for a decade within the Capucas Cooperative, where she currently holds dual roles as Quality Control Manager and Director of the Capucas Academy. A committed coffee producer and an accomplished technical specialist, she brings deep expertise in sensory analysis, quality assurance, and producer training. She is an AST Trainer and a Licensed Q Grader, complemented by advanced certification as a Master in Coffee Training across all related areas. Her excellence in the field is further demonstrated by earning First Place in the National Barista Championship in both 2016 and 2017, representing Honduras at the World Barista Championship for two consecutive years.
Yuri Tabora
Yuri Tabora is part of the technical team at COCAFCAL, where she works in the area of solid and liquid organic product development, using byproducts. Her work focuses on the efficient transformation of raw materials, ensuring quality standards, sustainability, and compliance with established technical processes.
Araceli Peraza
Araceli Peraza is a member of the Capucas team whose work is grounded in strategic thinking. She approaches her work with creativity, initiative, and a leadership style that prioritises clarity, teamwork, and shared success.
Dania Booth
Dania Booth is a purpose‑driven professional dedicated to helping mission‑aligned organizations achieve sustainable growth and long‑term development impact. With a strong foundation in sustainable finance, ESG integration, and impact investment, she supports companies in aligning their strategies with global sustainability standards while strengthening their financial resilience.
Emaediong Akpan
Emaediong Akpan is a legal practitioner, called to the Nigerian Bar in 2015. She graduated from the MA programme Development Studies with a specialization in Women and Gender Studies at the International Institute of Social Studies, Erasmus University Rotterdam.
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For decades, Iran has remained a site of conflict, characterized by tensions between the nation and the state as well as disputes with the USA (United States of America) and other Western countries. Within these conflicts, ‘Internet connection’ emerged as a central point of contention. The Iranian regime framed free access to the internet as a national threat, citing ‘enemy’ conspiracies both inside and outside the country aimed at toppling the state; conversely, Iranian citizens envisioned ‘connection’ as a fundamental tool for dissidence and resistance against suppression, while US companies served as providers of the platforms.
When these internal and international tensions escalated to unprecedented levels in January 2026, the regime adopted a policy of total disconnection. In this blog, the author explains how the concept of ‘connection’ was negotiated within these domestic and global dynamics.
Photo Credit: Bliss Team
From the connected to disconnected Iran
The catastrophic collapse of the Iranian Rial, coupled with soaring inflation, triggered immediate frustration among the working class and traditional shopkeepers in the Grand Bazaar.
Within days, the uprising spread from Tehran to less privileged cities across Iran. Compelling videos and images of the protests streamed across social media. In one instance, impoverished residents in Abdanan entered a semi-public chain store and, rather than looting food, scattered rice over their heads to symbolize a quest for dignity over basic survival. Similarly, young protesters recorded poignant messages, stating, ‘If we are not there on the day of victory, please remember us and celebrate happily,’ anticipating the severe repression that would meet their peaceful demonstrations.
Protesters in Abdanan (Ilam province) scatter rice after raiding a chain store company
A call from the exiled crown prince also prompted many Iranians in numerous cities to join the movement. Meanwhile, the Trump administration warned the regime against killing protesters, stating that its ‘gun is prepared and fully loaded,’ and former US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo tweeted an allusion to the role of Israeli intelligence in the protests. When ten days of targeted throttling and localized cuts failed to quell the unrest, the regime implemented a systematic blackout on January 8 to mask a massive escalation in state violence. This moment served as a stark reminder of how the concept of a ‘free global internet’ is often overshadowed by the pursuit of ‘national digital sovereignty.’
A tweet posted by the former United States Secretary of State at the onset of protests in Iran
Furthermore, geopolitical resentment toward US and Israeli actions deterred many leftists from acknowledging the protests’ genuine character: a struggle by unarmed citizens against decades of domestic colonization. Consequently, the media narrative surrounding these events was dominated by outlets with right-wing leanings.
During the darkness of the total blackout, Starlink terminals were utilized within Iran to breach the digital isolation – an opportunity afforded to Iranians by the power dynamics between the regime and the US. In response, the Iranian military deployed mobile jammers to disrupt satellite signals, demonstrating a new level of technical sophistication in their censorship efforts. Through these Starlink connections, a limited number of videos were propagated, depicting thousands of protesters – a scale far exceeding the demonstrations of recent decades – alongside grim images of mass casualties in morgues. These connections also carried the voices of witnesses who testified to how regime forces shot indiscriminately at citizens, regardless of social class, region, gender or ideology. Cut off from their families and friends back home, the vast Iranian diaspora – numbering between 5 and 10 million – stepped in as gatekeepers. They organized worldwide demonstrations and worked tirelessly to ensure the world witnessed the state violence by sharing videos of the protests, the faces of the victims and their individual stories.
On 13 January 2026, mobile operators briefly restored international calling capabilities in Iran. These first calls from within the country were historic, occurring in an atmosphere described as apocalyptic. Constrained by the exorbitant cost of international rates and the threat of state surveillance, callers delivered brief, urgent messages devoid of detail: ‘They killed so many more than you could ever imagine!’. Members of the diaspora shared these conversations with exiled media outlets, such as Iran International and BBC Persian, providing firsthand testimony from inside the country. These narrow pipelines of connection allowed international agencies to begin fact-checking the scale of the state violence. Facing mounting global pressure, the Iranian government eventually published a list naming 3,117 victims; however, this figure stood in stark contrast to reports from the Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA), which claimed 6,842 deaths, and estimates from the UN Special Rapporteur on Iran, which ranged from 5,000 to as high as 20,000.
Reconnection
As intermittent internet connectivity was gradually restored, VPNs enabled those within Iran to send messages, albeit in a restricted capacity. Furthermore, innovations such as Snowflake – a plug-in for the Tor Project – allowed volunteers worldwide to turn their computers into temporary ‘bridges.’ By disguising Iranian users’ traffic as regular WebRTC calls (resembling video chats), these bridges forwarded data to the open internet, facilitating the sharing of numerous protest videos with international audiences.
Image by Author
However, these emerging visuals were disseminated against a backdrop of competing, reductionist narratives: international observers often framed the situation through the lens of a potential geopolitical deal or war between the regime and the US; some diasporic opposition groups used exiled media to represent the unrest as evidence of their own domestic support; and state media depicted the uprising as a terrorist coup orchestrated by Israel and the US In response, Iranian citizens used their restricted connection to counter these misrepresentations through unprecedented embodied actions.
At funerals, families invited crowds to clap, dance, and trill rather than engage in traditional mourning, reframing grief as an epic struggle and transforming humiliation into pride and frustration into collective action. During these events, parents of the victims publicly declared their pride in their children’s sacrifice for a free Iran.
A picture of the stampede at the funeral of Ali Taheri, one of the protesters killed (Source: Radio Farda).
Ultimately, the internet in Iran remains a site where the ideal of global connection and the pursuit of national digital sovereignty clash. While the regime employs increasingly sophisticated strategies of censorship and surveillance, Iranians trapped within the walls of isolation continue to build volatile transnational ties, challenging the narratives that seek to oversimplify their struggle.
Opinions expressed in Bliss posts solely reflect the views of the author of the post in question
Somayeh Ghobadi
To the memory of Somayeh Ghobadi– a single mother who bore the weight of economic hardship with quiet resilience, and whose life was taken by state forces before she was granted the simple, final mercy of holding her daughter one last time.
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