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.

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.
The CFC’s Enimiro, case illustrates this tension. The Ugandan SME sources vanilla from around 4,300 smallholders, and Enimiro’s impact report indicates that approximately 18% of suppliers are women. While this provides a useful reference point, it also exposes what the literature warns about. Income gains do not automatically translate into control over income. Women’s participation often increases unpaid labour burdens that remain invisible in quantitative reporting. When we wear an intersectional lens, we are reminded that “women” is not a homogeneous category: young women, widows, women with disabilities, and women from minority ethnic groups may experience the same project in profoundly different ways.
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.
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About the author:

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.
Read her blogs here: 1, 2, 3 ,4
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A humanitarian crisis with multiple consequences
Kalehe is one of the territories in the province of South-Kivu located in the northern side of Bukavu city (capital city of South-Kivu province). It covers the Eastern littoral of the Kivu Lake in Eastern DRC. Decades ago, there was a large tree-planting effort to protect the environment. In recent years, however, Kalehe’s population has grown rapidly due to the presence of Internally Displaced People (IDPs) in the territory. As a result of this, Kalehe has experienced widescale and rapid deforestation and loss of grassland in the middle and high plateaux to produce wood and charcoal without planting other trees.
In the night of 4 May 2023, heavy rains caused water levels to rise,as well as flooding in some villages of the Bushushu groupement in the Buhavu chiefdom of this territory. The Lukungula River of Bushushu, and the Kamikonzi River in Nyamukubi went beyond their limits, resulting in flooding and spreading of mixture of water, large stones, and mud in four out of seven sub villages of the locality, particularly Bushushu, Kabuchungu, Nyamukubi and Musumba. The humanitarian consequences of this were dramatic and multiform: 5525 people missing, more than 513 bodies buried, more than 2046 houses totally destroyed, more than 562 families mourning, many schools and health centres destroyed, loss of household assets including tables, chairs, and loss of documents of value such as electoral cards. The DRC HO team conducted fieldwork from 29 through 30 June 2023 in the area to know more about the crisis. 