Bettering lives in Kenya with ActionAid

Kenyan tea has long been one of the most important parts of our blends. We’ve been visiting this beautiful country for many years, building projects and relationships with our partners and tea farmers.

Much of the tea we buy from Kenya comes from smallholders. These farmers and informal workers 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.

Women working in tea

Women are especially exposed to these challenges. Most informal workers are young, landless women, many of whom are economic migrants from other regions who move to tea growing areas in search of jobs. The absence of formal contracts and the seasonality of available work leads to a lack of job security, living incomes and access to basic services and entitlements. Women working in this area are also more at risk of violence. They are largely ​‘invisible’ in the international tea supply chain and their rights, both as workers and as citizens, are therefore overlooked. They are one of the most vulnerable groups in the tea industry.

We’re collaborating with ActionAid, the Ethical Tea Partnership (ETP) and Lavazza Professional to empower tea farming communities in Kenya. ActionAid will work on the ground with ETP to understand the wide range of challenges that affect smallholder tea farmers and workers – especially the most marginalised. They will empower workers to understand their rights to a positive working environment, freedom from violence and access to services, and mobilise to claim them.

About ActionAid’s Human Rights Based Approach

ActionAid is an international charity that is dedicated to working with women and girls living in poverty.

Their human rights-based approach means that local people are the drivers of their own change and can claim the rights they are entitled to, regardless of where they are born.

They work closely with local people to empower them to understand their rights, and they are committed to increasing the accountability of key players who are responsible for protecting and fulfilling these rights. 

A human-rights-based approach means combining change at the local level with policy action. For people to claim their rights, we need to change the policies and practices that make people poor. 

“In the tea communities it is mostly women who suffer. The women are the ones who work to provide for their families. A female representative who has been raised here and understands our challenges, like me, would be well placed to raise our grievances.

I attended the ActionAid training sessions from the first day. I think ActionAid can help us voice our issues to the government and factories.” 

Patricia – mother of three and small scale tea farmer, Meru.

Our Partnership

Through our partnership we aim to:

  • Enable access to better working conditions and pay — by paving the way for productive dialogue between workers and key industry and government stakeholders and ensuring better policies to secure fair pay and conditions are put in place.
  • Amplify women’s voices within the industry and tackle the causes of violence towards women — by supporting survivors of violence to access essential services and legal aid, advancing women’s land rights and training industry management on gender-based violence.
  • Support smallholder farmers and informal workers to diversify their incomes through access to entrepreneurship training and finance.

“ActionAid’s project is the first time we’ve 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 Ward, Agricultural Officer, Meru County

Since starting in January 2022, the partnership has already exceeded its plans. So far we have: 

  • Established 49 Solidarity Groups for smallholder farmers and informal workers and provided training on women’s rights and the responsibility of local government to provide essential public services, including water, healthcare and education.
  • Trained 1,571 Rights Champions – 80% of whom are women – to help others learn about and claim their rights and formed three women’s networks. To date, the networks have supported seven women to report cases of Gender Based Violence (GBV) and access medical and judicial support. 
  • Mapped public services to identify gaps and provide women with guided access to support services. 
  • Supported women to participate in their local county planning processes with community members, successfully securing local government funding to rehabilitate a road and build two new classrooms in two schools.

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 600,000 small-scale farmers and 300,000 informal tea workers in Kenya.

You can read more about ActionAid’s work and stories from Meru County here.