Upholding women’s rights in Kenya

[This story references sexual and gender-based violence that some may find distressing.]

Smallholder farmers and informal workers play a vital role in tea supply chains – and in Kenya, the majority are women.

Their work is informal, which means they are more likely to face low incomes, poor working conditions, and lack access to essential public services. Rates of violence against women in Kenya’s smallholder tea sector are also high.

To change this, ETP is partnering with ActionAid, Taylors of Harrogate, Lavazza Professional and the Kenya Tea Development Agency (KTDA) in a three-year pilot. Empowering Tea Communities in Kenya (Jan 2022 – Dec 2024) is supporting smallholder farmers and informal workers in three tea growing regions in Kenya – Meru, Nakuru and Murang’a counties – with a special focus on women, children, and people marginalised within their communities.

Meet Durah

Durah [name changed to protect her identity], 39, works as a tea farm supervisor in several estates around Meru County, Kenya. She is also a smallholder farmer, with a small piece of land producing around 200kg of tea a month.

She is a participant in the project, and shared the challenges she sees tea pickers facing.

“Most of the [women] I stay with on the tea estates are single mothers,” Durah noted. “Some have been chased away [from their homes] even with their children.”

“Some mothers take their children to the farm with them when they pick tea, because what else can they do?” she explained. “You can find children as young as ten picking tea. Some of them even miss school to pick tea.”

What it takes to survive

Tea pickers usually work with one farm, but once those tea bushes are exhausted, they must walk long distances to find other farms with tea to pick. According to Durah, this has collided with the effects of climate change and a rising cost of living.

“During periods of drought, like recently, workers could only collect five kilograms [of tea per day]. These women [might] have three children [to feed], and the price of flour has gone up.”

Durah says that some women have been forced to engage in transactional sex to earn enough money to feed, clothe, and educate their children. She is also troubled by the high levels of violence against women workers, and the lack of support from tea industry management to address it.

“Violence occurs but most [cases] go unreported,” she said. “When women come [to report violence they have faced], most of them are just given 500 shillings [£3.24], they get some advice and leave, and the case is forgotten.”

Creating a way out

Before the project started, the community did not have an effective mechanism to report the issues they are facing. However, recent training sessions by ActionAid and ETP have introduced new rights-based approaches to support them. Empowering Tea Communities in Kenya focuses on several areas at once to build environments where human rights are upheld, protected, and respected – with a particular focus on women.

Durah was pleased to see a platform emerging through which issues can be raised. “I think what they taught us at the trainings will help us, because we [raised] our issues and it was good,” she said. “I think if women were organized into groups and given seed money after some formal training it may help them, especially the single mothers.”