Women’s Month Series 2026 | Scaffolding the Future: Women farmers and the institutions that make leadership possible

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.

 

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

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 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 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 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 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 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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