In the department of Choluteca in southern Honduras, hundreds of rural women have turned crops into personal income, resilience and opportunity for their families. In communities where women's agricultural work went largely unseen for years, their presence in the fields and in processing plants is changing livelihoods and challenging stereotypes.

"Women are capable of anything, as long as we believe we are," said Denia Calderón, an okra producer who now sits on the board of directors of CAVEXSA, an exporter that employs more than 600 people in the area. She was a housewife and says so without embarrassment; at first she did not want to enter agriculture because it felt like heavy work meant for men. Over time she learned to manage production, deal with pests and make decisions in the field, and today she works her own plot, employs others and takes part in the leadership of her organisation. Okra, she says, paid for her dream of visiting her sister in Spain.

In San Marcos de Colón, the San Marqueña Coffee Cooperative (COCASAM) has placed its specialty coffee in international markets and creates jobs on farms and in its processing plant. Selena Mercado arrived in 2008 and began, like many women, in the less visible roles: filling bags, transplanting seedlings, working in nurseries. Her skill led her to specialise in selecting high-quality coffee, and for the past five years she has been a permanent employee who operates the plant's forklift, a job that until recently was almost always held by men. "We all have the right to learn," she said.

Evenilda Morán retired as a primary school teacher in 2015 and thought she would stay at home. She owned land suited to sugarcane but had never farmed. She is now president of the Union of Sugarcane Producers of the South (UPROCASUR), an organisation of small and medium producers, and trained with the rest of its board in production, machinery, quality control and management to start the country's first industrial plant for powdered sugarcane. The plant now employs hundreds of people in the harvest season, and she points to the income that sustains households, the young people who might otherwise migrate and the skills of workers who had never set foot in an industrial plant.

María Rutilia Mendoza, an associated producer at COCASAM and secretary of its Oversight Board, credits collective organisation. "Before, we delivered our production to intermediaries," she said; by organising, the growers raised the economic value of their coffee. She has since turned her farm into a small business that adds agritourism and artisanal products to coffee, drawing national and international visitors.

The business plans of CAVEXSA, COCASAM and UPROCASUR have been supported by the ComRural II project, implemented by the Government of Honduras with the World Bank Group. ComRural II has backed 19 business plans from Rural Producer Organizations with more than 2,500 members, one-third of them women, with specific measures to support women's employment, and it aligns with AgriConnect, the Bank Group's initiative to transform small-scale agriculture. In a country where women are far more likely than men to hold vulnerable jobs, the point of these stories is that leadership in agriculture can begin after retirement, grow from collective learning and start with one opportunity.

Source: World Bank