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TPSA Success Stories on Overcoming Gender-Based Barriers to Exporting

June 24, 2019

Read about the successes the TPSA project has achieved in helping women overcome gender-based barriers to exporting.

  • After a five-day women-focused leadership training program, Isna Rosa has become a more confident speaker and facilitator; she has also begun advocating for gender equality and women’s leadership within Ara Cahayani Gayo (ACG) cooperative.
  • Many women lack the experience and confidence to act as leaders within the many coffee cooperatives located in the Gayo region. TPSA was approached by current leaders of coffee cooperatives in Gayo who wanted to help their women members gain the knowledge, skills, and confidence they need to become leaders within these co-ops.
  • A training workshop designed and delivered by the TPSA gender team and staff from the Indonesian Export Training Centre (IETC) helped a group of Indonesian women entrepreneurs learn about digital marketing techniques and best practices, as well as gender equality issues and how they affect women’s business success.
  • While any man who is a coffee farmer can easily join a cooperative, the same is not true for women coffee farmers. For a coffee farmer to be eligible for cooperative membership, he or she must legally own land. But in Gayo, land ownership is usually in the man’s name, making women coffee farmers ineligible for co-op membership. TPSA helped A3 Cooperative, a newly established women-exclusive cooperative with capacity-building training workshops aimed at promoting gender-responsive co-op governance and women’s leadership in coffee cooperatives.
  • The TPSA gender team interacted with women co-op members during the gender and trade study, and provided them with capacity-building through export training and gender-related training, including a gender-awareness workshop, a training-of-trainers on women’s leadership, and a workshop on gender-responsive co-op governance. These experiences gave some of those women the confidence to pursue the idea of setting up a forum for women in cooperatives. The Gayo Coffee Women’s Forum was officially launched on November 29, 2018, in Takengon, Aceh, and TPSA and Fairtrade–NAPP were there to lend their support.
  • The Ministry of Trade plays a key role in promoting gender equality in trade. As TPSA’s main partner, it must be equipped with the knowledge and know-how to perform this role. TPSA designed and conducted three capacity-building activities: a workshop on gender awareness, a workshop on gender analysis in trade and value chains, and a workshop on gender-responsive budgeting and planning.
  • Training courses offered by the Indonesian Export Training Centre (IETC) of the Ministry of Trade are are open to any company, regardless of whether it is women- or men-led. However, the IETC observed that many women-led SMEs are smaller than those led by men, but are interested in expanding their business and exporting. The TPSA gender team helped IETC identify topics related to current export trends that would be beneficial to women-led SMEs. The first topic identified was the use of digital marketing to support exports.