A three-year, multi-country programme with a transformative approach to women’s leadership and change.
Despite playing a critical role in global tea production, women are highly underrepresented in leadership. They are often excluded from management roles, decision-making spaces, and the chance to influence existing leaders.
Women have the right to contribute to decisions that govern their lives and livelihoods – without becoming leaders in the very systems that discriminate against them.
Our Tea, Our Voice is an opportunity to critically reimagine how women’s leadership can be achieved in tea.
Project overview
Multi-country initiative, co-funded by the German development agency GIZ, that will promote transformative leadership through women’s inclusion.
Project partners
ETP core funding, the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ), R.Twining and Co Ltd., Ringtons Ltd., and Ostfriesische Tee Gesellschaft GmbH & Co. KG
Our Tea, Our Voice aims to support women – including young women, informal workers, and migrants – to be confident in their ability to hold leadership positions.
The three-year project will promote and normalise women as equally capable leaders and decision-makers, to ensure they are valued in all spheres of their lives, and by all community members.
Our Tea, Our Voice recognises that there is no ‘one size fits all’ approach to supporting women’s empowerment. Instead, each area of the initiative will be deeply collaborative, with considerable freedom to use new ideas and ways of working.
We will pair a tea producer with a local women’s rights organisation in each country. This organisation will work with women living and working on the tea estates to identify the changes they want to see.
The work will then be directed, led, and monitored by the women themselves, with support from the women’s rights
The initiative is in its beginning stages, but agreements and due diligence have been completed between ETP, funders, and in-country partners.
Two inception workshops have been held in Rwanda and Kenya. These will be used to tailor the projects to each country’s respective needs.
ETP is also setting up governance structures for the initiative, which will steer decision-making across all three countries.
