IDH is supporting fruit and fresh produce company Fyffes to implement gender equality programs in Costa Rica and Honduras. In addition to involvement in project funding, IDH is playing a strategic role in sharing best practices to identify and respond to challenges faced by women both in the workplace and in their communities.
To establish a framework for moving forward, IDH provided Fyffes with key learnings from its successful gender initiative in the Ethiopian flower industry — with particular focus on approach and methodology. Core to this is a thorough understanding of culture and local context, and initial scoping exercises to determine core issues such as violence and sexual harassment, and to identify gaps in working conditions, income, asset control and decision-making between genders in order to seek interventions to address them. From this basis follows the setting up and training of focused gender committees, identifying priorities to work on, supporting farms with writing policies on gender, and establishing protocols for fighting discrimination.