A Coffee Plantation with Purpose: Sowing Autonomy and Leadership

^{Photo: UN Women/Óscar Leiva}

Rosario Elizabeth Ramos lives in the Trifinio region of El Salvador. She is 48 years old and the mother of a son with Down syndrome. For years, her routine revolved around a single question: How can I ensure my son’s development and autonomy? The answer didn’t come immediately, but today, Rosario leads a women’s coffee producers’ cooperative, coordinates a community savings group, and has managed to make her agroecological coffee plantation—registered in her son’s name—a part of a sustainable production model that is now entering the market thanks to a partnership with the IDB.

Her experience reflects why the Women, Local Economy and Territories (MELYT) program, implemented by UN Women and funded by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation (MAECI) through the Italian Agency for Development Cooperation (AICS), decided to make care work a strategic focus in its second phase.

Testimonies like Rosario’s show that without recognizing, redistributing, and supporting care work, it is impossible to advance economic autonomy or local development. 

Transforming exclusion into opportunity 

Getting her son accepted into school was not an easy task. Rosario had to insist repeatedly, confront prejudice, and prove that he had the right to learn. Eventually, after several meetings, they agreed to admit him, on one condition: she had to accompany him in the classroom to support him.

“The first year I was with him, inside, on a little bench, helping him make little balls. The supervisor said they would accept him, but the mother had to stay inside to assist,” Rosario explains.

During that time, Rosario took the opportunity to begin training. “I felt the need to educate myself, to learn, and to share that knowledge with other women,” she says. She trained in literacy, soap making, baking, and agricultural production. Often without resources, she depended on her partner’s willingness to let her participate.

“I asked my husband for permission, and he said he didn’t have money to give me. I told him not to worry about the money, that I just needed his permission,” Ramos recalls.

Today, Rosario not only produces coffee. She teaches her son to bake bread, makes soap with him, and includes him in productive, sustainable, and learning activities. Alongside other women in her community, she has driven a cooperative that, thanks to their savings group, has built a processing plant, an essential step in accessing investment funds and marketing coffee under better conditions. The coffee plantation is also managed with conservation practices. Rosario cares for the land as part of her vision for the future. 

^{Photo: UN Women/Óscar Leiva}

Recognize, redistribute, and transform: care as a pillar of local development 

With women like Rosario Ramos, the MELYT program identified a clear pattern: women who sustain family, community, and environmental care need economic autonomy. Many are productive leaders, but also invisible caregivers.

In its first phase (2018–2021), MELYT focused on strengthening community organization and financial inclusion. During that process, a shared conclusion emerged: care responsibilities were a structural barrier to the economic growth of women and their communities. Without access to services, without redistribution of domestic work, without personal time, entrepreneurship was not enough.

That’s why in its second phase (2023–2025), MELYT prioritized care work as part of its comprehensive development strategy. This decision enabled the integration of productive strengthening processes with actions aimed at creating local welfare systems, training in shared responsibility, and fostering institutional partnerships to influence public policy.

UN Women has actively participated in the formulation and implementation of El Salvador’s National Policy on Shared Responsibility for Care, a framework that seeks to recognize, redistribute, and reduce the burden of unpaid care work for people with disabilities in dependent situations and older adults who have lost autonomy. This burden has historically fallen on women.

This policy, developed through dialogue with institutions and communities and supported by regional UN Women specialists with experience in other countries, incorporates local learnings and proposes a sustainable, territorially based model with shared social and public responsibility.

Cases like Rosario’s illustrate this: her economic autonomy did not happen in the absence of responsibilities, but rather despite a heavy care workload, thanks to a strategy that combined training, organization, and access to solidarity financial services. As a member of her savings group, she has managed loans that now support her cooperative’s infrastructure. As a caregiver, she has included her son in production processes. As an organized woman, she has empowered other women to develop their capacities. 

From international commitment to local action 

These actions align with global commitments toward Beijing+30, particularly regarding the Beijing Platform for Action, which, in its Women and Economy section, calls for recognizing the value of unpaid work, facilitating work-life balance, and integrating care into economic and social systems. By incorporating care as a pillar of territorial economic empowerment, MELYT has made a substantive contribution to advancing this global commitment through local practice.

“I know many women who depend entirely on their husbands because they don’t have a business or a single cent in their hands. That happened to me, too. When my son started school, I had the opportunity to receive training at the mayor’s office, and my husband told me he didn’t have the money to give me. I told him I’d figure it out, but I was going anyway,” Rosario says.

Rosario’s experience is not isolated. It reflects the journey of many rural women who sustain the well-being of their families and communities without recognition or structural support. Her story confirms that without a comprehensive approach to care, we cannot discuss economic autonomy or territorial development with women as the protagonists.

That’s why UN Women continues to promote the construction of care systems that recognize women’s work, redistribute it socially, and integrate it into public policies.

The challenge toward Beijing+30 is not only to advance international commitments. It is to ensure, from the ground up, that women like Rosario can fully exercise their rights, without having to choose between caring for others and developing themselves.