“It’s a priority of ours to build horizontal relationships with organizations where we can mutually illuminate each other to find viable and sustainable projects,” said Diana Martinez, Executive Director of the Fundación Entre Mujeres (La FEM) at a meeting on WCCN’s June study tour. As noted in a preceding article by Executive Director Carlos Arenas, the relationship which WCCN helped facilitate between La FEM and Madison-based coffee roaster Just Coffee culminated in the purchase of the full coffee harvest of the co-ops with which La FEM works.

Opening up North American markets through Just Coffee will undoubtedly have a significant impact on the lives of its coffee producers. However, to look at La FEM as simply rural coffee producers would only be telling one small portion of their story.

La FEM’s history is unique in that its beginning as a Nicaraguan non-governmental organization is rooted in helping rural women access land for productive purposes. “It’s important for women to hold land. It’s hard for them to have a life based on equality without it,” said Martinez.

Following the 1990 elections, much of the land that had been state-operated in the 1980s was privatized. During the 1980s, the founders of La FEM had been active as part of the Women’s Secretariat of the Asociación de Trabajadores del Campo (ATC) or Farm Workers Association. However, during the privatization process that occurred in the early 1990s, rural women were excluded from the decision-making process on who would be the proprietors of the newly-privatized land and how that land would be operated under private businesses. The idea behind the creation of La FEM was to build an autonomous organization for rural women that would challenge the traditional, male-dominated hierarchal model of rural organizations such as the ATC.

Today, La FEM is committed to the social, economic and ideological development of rural women. It uses a variety of strategies, including raisinging women’s consciousness about the struggle against gendered violence, promoting sexual and reproductive rights, and raising the education level of rural women. Additionally, La FEM aims to build a model of sustainable economic production based on principles of solidarity and cooperation among women.

To address these development issues, La FEM operates a number of different programs, such as a mobile health clinic, gender workshops, and a land parcel program in which women learn to raise pigs, cows, chickens and roosters on their land.

Through this multilayered development process, La FEM has seen that the women with whom they work have become greater advocates for themselves in their homes, their communities and also at the national level. “Their development begins in the subjective, and emerges in the public sphere. This transition is able to happen in large part because of land ownership,” stated Martinez.

WCCN is committed to helping address the struggles of rural Nicaraguan women and is currently working with La FEM in creating a pilot project which will help make land access a reality for landless women. On a final note, we would like to thank Just Coffee for their shared commitment to the ideology of empowerment that La FEM exudes, and to encourage readers to buy Just Coffee’s La FEM blend when it becomes available later this year.