Empowering tea communities in Kenya
ActionAid is proud to be working in partnership with the Ethical Tea Partnership, Taylors of Harrogate and Lavazza Professional to empower tea farming communities in Kenya.
Together, we are working to ensure that smallholder tea farmers and informal workers on tea farms are able to claim their rights to a positive working environment.
Smallholder farmers and informal workers, especially women, play a vital role in the international tea supply chain. But the informal nature of their employment means they are more likely to face low incomes, poor working conditions, and lack access to essential public services such as clean water, safe housing, healthcare, and education.
Research recently commissioned by ETP and its partners also found that rates of violence against women in the smallholder tea sector in Kenya are high, with weak mechanisms in place to prevent violence and to respond when it does occur. The research also highlighted high instance of school-age children not attending school who are susceptible to working as tea pickers.
But ActionAid’s 50 years of experience have shown us that when farmers and workers come together, when they speak out and claim their rights, tremendous change is possible.
Kenya and tea: the facts
Kenya is Africa’s largest producer of tea. Kenya is the third largest producer of tea in the world, behind only India and Sri Lanka. As a result, the crop plays a huge role in the country’s economy, with around three million people earning their livelihoods from the sector.
Approximately 60% of tea in Kenya is produced on small-scale family farms. Women smallholder farmers and informal workers play a vital role in the industry making up the majority of the tea workforce.
About the partnership
In partnership with its member companies Taylors of Harrogate and Lavazza Professional, this three-year collaboration with the Ethical Tea Partnership will empower smallholder farmers and informal workers in three tea growing communities in Kenya.
Together ActionAid and Ethical Tea Partnership will consult farmers and workers to understand the issues they face and the impact of industry practices on their lives. We will also work directly with the Kenyan Tea Development Agency (KTDA) and other stakeholders to improve policies and working practices in the industry. Whilst 80% of programme participants will be women, we will also engage men as allies in all aspects of the programme.
What we are doing
In partnership we are:
Building an environment where human rights are upheld, protected and respected.
Ensuring the right policies are in place in the tea sector to ensure decent work and fair pay for farmers and workers.
Supporting farmers and workers to organise into Solidarity Groups and train Rights Champions to help others learn about and claim their rights.
Convening with key industry and government stakeholders so that farmers and workers can raise concerns and plan for and implement improvements.
Supporting women as they work to claim their right to freedom from violence.
Supporting the formation of women’s groups and networks amplify women’s voices, support women to challenge gender norms and discuss and claim their rights to freedom from violence.
Challenging gender-based violence and support survivors of violence to access essential services and legal aid.
Establishing a platform for dialogue with local government to advance women’s land rights, which are essential for raising women’s status and ending violence.
Training tea industry management to improve working practices and tackle gender-based violence.
Improving access to essential public services for tea workers and their families, including water, housing, healthcare and education.
Conducting a study on what is driving children to drop out of school and conducting a ‘back to school’ campaign in partnership with the local government authorities.
Supporting Solidarity Groups to develop Community-Led Change Plans (CLCPs) and provide training so that they can hold local governments accountable for their commitments.
Improving the livelihoods for smallholder farmers and informal workers.
Supporting women smallholder farmers and informal workers to diversify their incomes through access to entrepreneurship training and finance.
Establishing a sustainable programmatic model for scale-up.
Working with the Solidarity Groups, local government authorities and Kenya Tea Development Agency to embed the programme within communities with the ambition of scaling up to more communities in future.
Through this partnership we aim to establish 45 Solidarity groups across the 3 communities and training 1,350 Rights Champions, 80% of whom will be women. These Rights Champions will help improve the lives of 22,000 farmers and workers and their families.
Together, we will also bring about structural change within the Kenyan tea sector by influencing policy changes that will have a positive impact on approximately 300,000 small-scale farmers and 600,000 informal tea workers in Kenya.
What we have achieved so far
Since the partnership started in January 2022, we have established 49 groups for smallholder farmers and informal workers in three communities and have trained 1571 Rights Champions to help others learn about and claim their rights.
The groups have taken part in training on Women’s Rights. They have also taken part in training to learn about local government responsibility for providing essential public services including water, healthcare and eduction that respond to the needs of women and girls.
Women from the groups have been supported to form three women’s networks, one in each community, with five women elected per community to champion women and girls rights to live free from violence .
The networks have already supported seven women to report cases of violence against women and access the medical support, the judicial system and other support services.
They will mobilise additional women’s groups and share the knowledge learned in the trainings with other women in the second and third years of the project.
The groups have also been supported to conduct mapping of public services, unsafe areas for women, to identify gaps in service provision and to develop plans for the changes they want to influence in their communities.
They have undergone training to that they can hold local governments accountable for their commitments. In two project communities, Olenguruone and Ngere, 30 community members participated in their local county planning processes and have successfully secured local government funding to rehabilitate a road and build two additional classrooms in two schools.
The project has also completed a review of policies at national and county level to protect women from violence in Kenya and commenced a review of policies related to the tea value chain at International, National, County and Collection Centre level.
These policy reviews will be turned into communications tools for training smallholder farmers, informal workers, and key stakeholders tea-growing communities. The project will work with community and key stakeholders to address policy violations and to strengthen policies where needed.
Tea-picking in Kenya
Zera, 39, is a mother of three who has worked as a tea picker for the past 18 years.
She told us about the challenging working conditions tea pickers face as well as her hopes for the future after learning about workers’ rights and alternative income sources in ActionAid’s training.
Zera talks about the poor living and working conditions of tea pickers: from the poor housing with basic facilities, provided by employers, to the lack of protective clothing or shelter from the rain on the farms.
She reports that farmers sometimes refuse to pay them for the tea they've picked if it is rejected at the collection centre. Children of tea workers often help their parents pick tea while on school holidays, she says.
Zera believes that all the challenges the community face come from the low wages they earn and she would like to see support for them to develop alternative sources of income. Zera has attended ActionAid training and started learning about her rights as a worker.
“We have benefited from the ActionAid training. We learnt a lot of new things that we didn’t know before. We didn’t know we had any rights as tea workers, but we were taught about them, and I was happy”.
Zera* is a 39-year-old mother of three who works as an informal tea picker at several farms in Meru county.
Rehema Baya/ Africa Film Network/ActionAid
Durah*, 39, works as a supervisor on several tea estates and is a smallholder farmer.
ActionAid
Climate change and poverty affects women the most
Durah, 39, works as a tea farm supervisor and owns a small piece of land that produces around 200kg of tea a month.
She says that women working as tea pickers face high levels of violence, exacerbated by the conditions of poverty they are living in. She also told us about the lack of effective reporting and support mechanisms in place for survivors.
Tea pickers usually work with one farm but once those tea bushes are exhausted, they must walk long distances to find other farms with tea to pick. Tea production is impacted by climate change, she says.
“I think what ActionAid taught us at the training will help us because we raised our issues and it was good. If women were organised into groups and given seed money after some formal training it may help them, especially the single mothers.”
Rights for tea-pickers and farmers
Margaret is the local ward agricultural officer within Meru County.
She has worked within the Ministry of Agriculture since 1987. She told us about the challenges facing both tea pickers and farmers within a difficult economy and her hopes to standardise the labour rights of workers.
She shared that tea pickers are marginalised because they live in poor accommodation and don’t have power to decide how they work. They live hand-to-mouth because there are no organised platforms for them.
“The project is the first time we have heard about a plan to educate farmers on workers’ rights. We expect to see major changes with this structure ActionAid is bringing to the tea sector. Employers have value for that kilogram of tea that the worker is picking and they should have even more value for the human being who is enabling them to have it.”
Margaret, an agricultural officer in Meru County, discusses the lack of representation for tea pickers within the tea supply chain.
Rehema Baya/ActionAid
Page updated 26 March 2024
