What stayed with me was the contrast with the deep gender disparity that still characterizes coffee production. Women account for roughly 70% of the labor behind coffee production, yet their economic position often does not reflect the work they do. In Kenya, fewer than 10% of women own land individually, while globally women operate less than 30% of coffee farms.

This disparity sits within a supply chain in which roughly 80% of the world’s coffee is produced by smallholders. Whether it reaches us as a seven-dollar pour-over at a specialty café, a bag we brew at home, or a three-in-one sachet on the go, much of that coffee begins in farming households where the labor behind production does not necessarily translate into equivalent control over land, income, or decision-making.

A closer look at that disparity reveals a series of structural barriers. Land ownership can determine access to credit and the ability to invest in seedlings, inputs, or irrigation. Cooperative membership can affect access to seedlings, agronomy support, finance, market information, and payments. Registration determines who appears in the supply chain as the producer, while leadership determines who has a voice when producer organizations make decisions.

A coffee importer in Brussels or a roaster in Seattle cannot resolve land-tenure inequality or rewrite inheritance practices in a producing country. But buyers do decide which producer organizations receive contracts, how much coffee they purchase, whether relationships continue over several seasons, and whether social commitments influence supplier selection.

The good news is that solutions already exist at origin, although they have emerged in different ways. Some have been strengthened through development programs. In Kenya, for example, We Effect, a Swedish Development Organization, worked within coffee cooperatives to address women’s limited access to land, seedlings, training, savings mechanisms, and positions within cooperative structures. In Nandi County, the Kahawa na Mama initiative has brought the issue into the household itself, with participating groups using joint registration of coffee bushes between spouses as one way to give women a recognized stake in the crop they help produce.

Similar approaches are emerging elsewhere in East Africa. In Uganda, the EU-funded MARKUP II program, implemented by the International Trade Center in partnership with the East African Community, has introduced a Gender Household Approach within coffee-growing communities. Rather than treating the farm automatically as an enterprise belonging to the male household head, the approach works with couples on shared planning, decision-making and responsibility for the coffee garden. Through ITC’s SheTrades work, that household approach also extends into the business systems surrounding the coffee. Coffee enterprises are being supported to examine women’s participation as suppliers, workers and decision-makers; at Elgon Coffee Enterprises, this has included improving supplier records, digitizing coffee-quality information and using delivery documentation that encourages acknowledgment by both spouses.

That connection between the household and the commercial is a necessary recipe for gender equity in coffee production. Attitude change may matter within the family. Still, it becomes more consequential when it affects who is recognized as a supplier, who is associated with a delivery, and who becomes visible to the enterprise buying the coffee. Registration and recordkeeping are therefore not neutral administrative details. They can help determine whether women’s contribution remains informal or begins to acquire recognition within the commercial system itself.

Uganda also provides a more direct example of interventions around land. In Kanungu, Farm Africa worked with coffee farmers and cooperatives to introduce voluntary household land-use agreements through which women could gain recognized control over portions of household land for coffee production. This was combined with Village Savings and Loan Associations, links to financial institutions, and the Gender Action Learning System, which brings women and male household decision-makers together around questions of labor, income, and household planning. The program therefore did not approach women’s economic participation through training alone; it connected access to land, finance, decision-making, and cooperative participation.

In Ethiopia, TechnoServe’s Climate Resilience through Empowering Women program, supported by Global Affairs Canada and Nespresso, takes the institutional argument further along the coffee chain. Operating in Sidama and Oromia, the program works simultaneously with coffee-growing households, wet mills and the wider industry. Women receive farm-management and climate-resilience training alongside leadership support intended to increase their influence within coffee-growing households and communities. At the wet-mill level, the program combines quality, governance and environmental improvements with leadership and management training for women, recognizing that greater participation in production has limited effect. Women remain absent from the institutions that control processing, quality, and commercial decision-making.

Other initiatives have emerged through women’s own organizing. The producer organization I visited in Meru, UGIMA, is one such example. Social entrepreneur Martin founded it after leaving the NGO sector to find a more self-sustaining model for social change, using coffee production as a vehicle for that transformation. His work began with a small group of women producers. Still, it gradually expanded through community dialogue and advocacy, including engagement with families and men to create opportunities for wives, daughters, and sisters to establish their own coffee production.

Today, the organization operates through two connected structures: a cooperative that forms the producer base, with more than 90% women members, and a separate social-enterprise arm that markets and facilitates coffee exports.

The cooperative does more than aggregate production. It supplies farmers with inputs and provides practical support on regenerative agriculture, including shade management, soil-moisture conservation using farm residues, composting with livestock manure and coffee husks, and intercropping with crops that improve soil health while providing additional household income. Its coffee clinic tests seedlings and supports grafting before distributing planting material to farmers, alongside lower-chemical approaches such as molasses-based traps for pest control. Women are represented on the cooperative board, while the all-women team of university graduates I encountered works across agronomy, post-harvest production, administration, market promotion and export facilitation. What began as collective organizing has therefore developed into a producer institution in which women participate not only as coffee growers, but across production, governance, technical services and market access.

Whether externally supported or self-organized, these initiatives show that the first mile has plenty of solutions. What many producer groups need is not another program designed for them, but reliable commercial partners willing to buy their coffee and build longer-term trading relationships.

Some companies are already approaching sourcing this way. Girls Who Grind Coffee in the UK sources 100% of its coffee from women producers, but its model goes beyond the “women-grown” label. The company emphasizes larger purchases, repeat relationships, and traceability rather than building its sourcing around isolated high-scoring microlots. In practice, that means returning to the same producers over time and treating women growers as long-term commercial partners rather than as the story behind an occasional specialty lot.

Similarly, Kahawa 1893 was founded in the United States by a Kenyan entrepreneur with the idea of building a stronger commercial connection between East African coffee producers and the consumers buying their coffee abroad. The company sources from farming partners in Kenya, Rwanda, and Congo, with a strong focus on women producers, but its model goes beyond sourcing alone. It also brings the consumer directly into the economic relationship through a tipping platform linked to its packaging, allowing customers to send additional payments to farming partners. Kahawa 1893 matches those contributions dollar for dollar. According to the company, these funds have supported investments such as equipment and livestock, creating an additional flow of capital alongside the coffee purchase itself.

The models differ, but the principle is the same: gender-responsive sourcing becomes part of the commercial relationship itself—who the coffee is purchased from, how much is purchased, whether that relationship continues, and how economic value reaches producers—rather than being added afterward as a marketing story. We need more companies at destination willing to build their sourcing around that principle: more Kahawa 1893s, more Girls Who Grind Coffees, and more buyers prepared to make women’s economic participation part of how they choose and sustain supplier relationships.

But we also need more origin initiatives that don't have to wait for a development program to arrive. This brings me back to Meru. Martin began with a small group of women farmers and spent years working not only with them, but with their families and communities, persuading farmers to create space for wives, daughters, and other women relatives to own or control productive land and establish coffee of their own. As he put it, “the argument becomes easier to make when people can see the results.”

Perhaps that is how some of the most durable change will spread: not only through programmes designed from outside, but through examples that become difficult to ignore from within. What I saw in Meru was one such example. The challenge now is to ensure that institutions like these meet buyers willing to turn that progress into durable commercial relationships.

#WomenInCoffee #ResponsibleSourcing #CoffeeSupplyChain #GenderEquity #SpecialtyCoffee

I remain deeply skeptical of one assumption underlying EUDR: that a smallholder growing coffee or cacao on less than an acre, and intercropping out of necessity with macadamia, avocado, and household food crops, should somehow be treated as a meaningful driver of the deforestation problem the Regulation seeks to address. That skepticism has only deepened as I spend more time with the realities of rural production, and it is not a concern smallholders themselves ignore. Elisa was part of a cohort of 137 producers, mostly women, whom I interviewed to examine the exclusionary risks of emerging Regulation, primarily EUDR, through smallholder and gender perspectives.

I previously shared some of the farmers’ apprehensions in a Medium post—an article that generated unexpected in-person conversations and direct messages and ultimately helped prompt this newsletter. Among the concerns raised was the possibility that newly collected farm data could eventually be used for taxation, alongside broader questions about the socioeconomic implications of compliance. I also discussed constraints common in smallholder rural realities, including digital illiteracy and limited access. Yet some of these assumptions can be overstated. Nearly two-thirds of the farmers I interviewed owned smartphones, regularly purchased mobile data, and frequently used mobile-money applications.

What stood out instead was data-collection fatigue. Each Regulation, certification scheme, and buyer demanded more information, while little of lasting value remained with either the farmer or the cooperative. Elisa’s farm had already been mapped by government agencies and by a European coffee buyer. Yet, the latter dataset remained inaccessible to the cooperative, leaving it with little to show a future buyer. Data fatigue predates EUDR, but the Regulation is intensifying it. My concern is that rising compliance costs could further decouple smallholder producer groups from SME importers and roasters that maintain sourcing relationships with them.

Meanwhile, coffee, like other EUDR-covered commodities, has been flooded by one mobile application after another, including sophisticated systems that still run into data breakdowns. Much of the burden falls back upstream into Excel sheets, with fragmented information assembled later from Frankfurt, Amsterdam, or Brussels. Other tools collect data effectively but offer little utility to either the farmer or the cooperative, much like Elisa’s data now sits with a European buyer rather than remaining useful at origin.

The irony is that the frustration is increasingly shared. The same downstream actors that once benefited from keeping data inside closed systems now face the consequences: one cooperative I came across was effectively the custodian of 17 Excel sheets, many outdated, duplicated, or difficult to reconcile. Some had followed the apparent simplicity of single-point geolocation, which, as I explain below, can be poorly suited to smallholder land-use realities. The result is endless upstream updating, often with little incentive for farmers already experiencing the kind of data fatigue Elisa described.

What follows are a few lessons I have drawn from these conversations and from building around them. Some speak directly to EUDR and data sovereignty; others concern the wider opportunity for digital transformation at origin. They are not the only model, but they shaped the system we are building and helped us avoid several of the problems described above.

EUDR Has an Incentive Problem at Origin

To make compliance sustainable, we must address a structural misalignment: EUDR’s strongest regulatory incentive sits downstream, while the evidence it requires must originate upstream. The obligation falls primarily on actors placing products on the EU market, yet smallholders and many producer organizations do not necessarily share the same incentive to maintain EUDR-specific systems. This is particularly true where cooperatives can sell into non-EU markets, including China, or through auction systems without carrying the same compliance burden. Cooperatives with established relationships with European roasters face greater pressure, but the incentive problem remains.

This incentive misalignment creates a catch-22. Smallholders account for roughly 80 percent of global coffee production, so European buyers cannot bypass origin actors. EUDR cannot be satisfied from an office in Brussels, Paris, or Frankfurt: geolocation begins at the farm gate, and traceability depends on records maintained there. To keep those records accurate over time, the infrastructure must also create practical value for the farmers and cooperatives generating them. At Terraxis, as we developed our software Plotra, we recognized this incentive problem first, and everything flowed from there.

Context-Aware Systems Are Not Optional at Origin

Digital systems often assume neat, discrete parcel boundaries and rely heavily on satellite interpretation. But smallholder land use rarely fits that model. A single farm may include several parcels used by multigenerational family members, with boundaries that zigzag alongside neighboring plots while all production ultimately moves to the same mill.

We therefore moved beyond the apparent simplicity of a single GPS point and opted for boundary polygons. In these settings, a point may satisfy a minimum geolocation requirement while still doing little to distinguish adjacent parcels or prevent overlapping records. Mapping the boundary gives the cooperative a clearer representation of the actual production area and reduces that risk.

The same contextual approach matters when interpreting land-use change. EUDR is not about every tree cut, branch pruned, or temporary reduction in vegetation. The central question is whether forest was converted to agricultural use after the 2020 cut-off, not whether normal farm management altered canopy density. This let us avoid prohibitive satellite costs and build much higher confidence in a parcel’s size and land use—without policing routine farm management, such as pruning or removing trees affected by Coffee Berry Disease (CBD).

Leverage EUDR to Create Operational Infrastructure at Origin

Mapping a parcel is useful, but it means little if that record isn’t connected to the cherries delivered from the farm to the wet mill. That connection is where EUDR can become more than a compliance exercise.

For the cooperative, digitizing the existing workflow links producer records, deliveries, mill intake, batch formation, and inventory into one operational record. Bush counts, seedlings awaiting planting, certification membership, and other farm-level information can sit within the same system, replacing paper-heavy records with structured, usable data. A farmer’s delivery then becomes both a transaction confirmation and the first commercial event in the chain of custody. The same record can later serve another buyer without forcing farmers through another cycle of mapping and data collection.

For the farmer, a verified digital delivery history can turn data into an economic asset. It provides structured evidence of expected agricultural income that may support applications for crop financing through local SACCOs, creating more lasting value than a one-off payment for participating in a survey or mapping exercise.

This is not about turning compliance into charity. It is about avoiding the familiar cycle of fragmented spreadsheets and repeated data collection. If a cooperative can maintain a structured record and legitimately reuse it with future buyers, that is a feature, not a flaw. This aligns with the principle we support: useful, portable digital infrastructure rather than another closed compliance database. Data utility is a far stronger incentive for cooperatives and producer groups—it forces us to practice what we preach when building digital public goods.

Let the System Work With the Cooperative Workflow

Any system deployed at origin needs enough flexibility to reflect how the cooperative already works, rather than forcing it to reorganize around the software. Once the cooperative has meaningful ownership of the system, implementation becomes far easier. In our case, cooperatives began assigning their own officers to support farm mapping, reducing costs and reliance on external data-collection teams.

We also built role-based interfaces around existing responsibilities:

• Agronomists have the broadest role because they maintain regular contact with farmers. They can update production information, record regenerative-agriculture support, reflect newly planted seedlings in bush counts, and serve as an entry point for human-rights screening, including child labor and casual labor minimum-wage commitments.

• Collection center and wet mill staff focus on recording and authenticating deliveries before coffee moves into processing.

• Leadership and Admin staff can build export consignments in the system—bundling the Due Diligence Statement (DDS), human rights due diligence, and required export documents into one shareable resource for exporters or roasters, replacing 17 separate emails and WhatsApp PDFs.

Takeaway

EUDR has inadvertently triggered one of the largest waves of agricultural digitization in modern history. The question is what remains after the initial compliance push subsides: stick to the legacy of fragmentation, or convert it into long-term value. We chose the latter.

The bet is that EUDR can become one output of a broader digital transformation rather than the sole reason for building the system. That will not resonate with everyone, and it differs from traditional compliance-as-a-service models. But it follows directly from what we heard at origin. If farmers and cooperatives are expected to generate and maintain the evidence downstream compliance depends on, the infrastructure must work for them, too.

This works because we operate in specialty coffee and cacao sourcing, strengthen the chain of custody through relationships built on shared infrastructure, and pass this model directly to our roaster and confectionery clients. We see no conflict between upholding the principles of digital public goods, data sovereignty, and farmer data utility and delivering compliant, commercially sound practices that withstand regulatory scrutiny. The objective is not simply to capture more data, but to make the system genuinely useful to the cooperative staff already doing the underlying work.