Nespresso’s Transformative Changes for Gender Equality
This tailor-made programme strengthens the capacity of over 415 Nespresso agronomists across twenty countries to create deep structural changes for gender equality, known as gender transformative change. It covers three areas: 1) knowledge of gender transformative change 2) facilitation skills 3) self-reflection.
It is aligned with Nespresso’s AAA Sustainable Quality™ Program, which is a unique initiative to secure the highest quality green coffee required to produce the Nespresso Grand Cru coffees, whilst protecting the environment and enhancing farmer welfare.
Nespresso began embedding sustainability into its supply chain in 2003 with the launch of the AAA Sustainable Quality™ Program. The AAA Program is first and foremost a program for fostering long-term relationships with farmers while at the same time embedding sustainable practices into activities on farms and in surrounding landscapes and improving the yields and quality of harvests.
Today, Nespresso sources over 92 percent of its coffee through the AAA Program. This translates into the creation of favourable conditions for more than 142,754 farmers in 18 countries who benefit from premiums, the expert assistance of agronomists and a wealth of other pioneering initiatives such as the first ever retirement scheme for coffee farmers in Colombia.
The AAA Program has evolved considerably over time. While quality and productivity improvement through sustainable farm management are still at its core, it also focuses on building community and landscape resilience and responding to the wider systemic challenges the coffee sector faces such as gender inequality, which the AAA Program has been addressing since the end of 2014. Nespresso’s report The Positive Cup outlines the company’s broader commitment to sustainability and the way in which the Nespresso model creates shared value for all stakeholders.
Coffee quality, people & environmental sustainability
The tailor-made programme between KIT and Nespresso aims to help protect the future of the highest-quality coffee, to protect the natural environment, and to find a more sustainable and equitable outcome for its partner farmers. It is based on an understanding that quality and social and environmental sustainability are intertwined.
Drawing on a 2018 Nespresso gender analysis report, Working Together for Gender Equality, the programme supports Nespresso agronomists to undertake six-month participatory action learning trajectories where their work with women and men farmers, as change agents, becomes part of the agronomists’ learning process. KIT’s regional based gender-capacity-strengthening specialists work with Nespresso agronomists as regional cohorts. They use a series of capacity-strengthening interventions that reinforce each other including: accompaniment, mentoring, assignments and workshop-based learning. The programme is under-pinned by a framework of learning for action, learning in action and learning from action.
KIT is pleased to be working with Nespresso in support of its Gender Equality Strategy that ensures the AAA Program reaches and benefits men and women equally, promotes women’s empowerment and reduces gender disparities. Our work with Nespresso focuses on agronomists themselves, as the interface between Nespresso and coffee farmers, to strengthen them as catalysts for gender transformative change.