Empowering women and youth
How strengthening cooperative governance within a federation of coffee and cocoa producer organisations is benefiting women and young people in Togo.
Cocoa pods in the Plateaux region around Kpalime, Togo (Photo: David Stanley, via Flickr, CC BY 2.0)
In the Plateau region of Togo, the Federation of Unions of Coffee and Cocoa Producers of Togo (Fédération des Unions de Producteurs de Café et de Cacao de Togo, FUPROCAT) has around 11,000 members and is the main national umbrella organisation of coffee and cocoa producers in Togo.
Built on the principles of solidarity, inclusion and sustainability, its mission is to improve producers’ revenues, promote agroecological practices and to strengthen the resilience of rural communities.
Women play an essential and multidimensional role in the coffee and cocoa value chains, but their contributions are often invisible and they remain structurally marginalised, particularly limited by their lack of access to land tenure.
Young people provide much of the farm labour at the production level, but structural barriers, such as limited exposure to higher-value activities and limited access to land and finance, make coffee and cocoa farming risky and insufficiently rewarding for them.
Prior to the involvement of the Forest and Farm Facility (FFF), the composition of FUPROCAT’s membership only partially reflected these key producer constituencies: only 10% of its members were women and 15% young people. There were no dedicated organisational structures specifically for women and young people to draw on and improve their conditions.
Forest and Farm Facility activities
Recognising the importance of granting women and young people a formal role in decision making to strengthen cooperative governance, FUPROCAT sought FFF support to establish dedicated women and youth chapters within the association.
The aim of these was to give women and young people a formal voice, so the federation could provide guidance on issues specifically affecting them, advocate for making their contributions more visible and recognised, and to ensure their greater participation in decision-making bodies and overall greater consideration of their constraints.
Since 2018, FFF has supported FUPROCAT by providing funding for awareness raising workshops on the inclusion of women and young people, as well as for mobilising members to revise the organisation’s internal rules. FFF support has also enabled capacity building for women and young people in leadership, lobbying, advocacy, governance and networking.
Significance of impact
The ultimate impact of this continued FFF contribution was that in 2023, FUPROCAT successfully established women and youth committees, directly strengthening governance and transparency.
This support also led to greater recognition of women and young farmers through meetings between women and youth leaders and political and administrative authorities at the sub national level, as well as with research institutions and other stakeholders.
Conclusion
As a result of FFF’s support to FUPROCAT, women and young people have taken on leadership roles in drafting proposals for internal policy reforms.
What began as an awareness raising initiative has resulted in lasting institutional change, embedding women’s and young people’s voices at the heart of cooperative governance in Togo’s coffee and cocoa sector.
Further reading
Improving internal governance within an agricultural cooperative in Togo: strategies and results, André Yawo Tokpa (2024), project report