It is sadly known out of 1.3 billion people living below the poverty line, where unfortunately 70% of the poor are women. The main reasons are women tend to lack access to modern technologies, capital, land and other productive resources that enable them to benefit from economic development.
Anna Hutchens in "Empowering Women through Fair Trade? Lesson from Asia" analyzed the Trade Craft Sector governed by World Fair Trade Organization (WFTO) Asia in order to achieve women’s empowerment through fair trade. She explores the opportunity of women to take part in supporting economic household also some challenges which they might face both in cultural and market competition.
In the end, Hutchen offers two solutions to make the fair trade more efficient in achieving the women’s empowerment, which are by using the market-oriented business model and enforcing policy that addresses gender inequality more effectively.
Fair Trade and its movement
After the world war II, the fair trade movement came with an idea of “trade not aid” in order to support small scale producers in realizing the economic independence and development. Fair trade appears with two main concepts which are a product certification label and an organization mark. In 1997 Fair Trade Labelling Organization was born to manage Fairtrade standard-setting, product certification and trade auditing and producer support services, continued by Fair Trade Organization (FTO) which governed by the World Fair Trade Organization (WFTO).
Craft Fair Trade
The mainstream concept of fair trade brings the challenges to women, study found that women participation in the FTOs are rare, in Mayan Coffee community in Guatemala for example, only seven of the 116 cooperative members were female and no one hold a managerial position on the organization.
Regarding to this issue, Nicholles and Opal suggest that the trade should be specifically in one product which is really related to women, fair trade craft comes as a solution. The hand craft sector seems to be accessible for uneducated women, indeed the production process can be done at home.
This fair trade craft is without any problems, even if the numbers of women who are working in this sector increased, they find difficulties in selling their products. Some of the products do not match the requirement of the market, such as out of fashion, the FTOs usually set the charity marketing model in selling their products.
Lesson from WFTO-Asia in empowering women through fair trade craft
WFTO-Asia realized that the old strategy by charity trade model is no longer create sustainability in fair trade craft. Between 2001 and 2008 WFTO-Asia coordinated a regional level programme for producer capacity building to improve WFTO’s market access and market competitiveness.
FTOs come to an idea of non-interventionist which implies supporting producers to find markets to their products rather than guiding what and how artisan to make ensure their products will sell. The charity trade model is totally changed into supply-driven engagement model of today and the market driven engagement model of tomorrow.
However, this strategy is not yet perfect where the WFTO-Asia still find a barrier in putting gender equality in the fair trade. It is difficult to address the gender issue because it is related to cultures in which there is not yet policy to frame this need in realizing women empowerment through fair trade. This is considered as homework that needs to be done soon.
Reference:
Anna Hutchens. Empowering Women through Fair Trade? Lessons from Asia. Third Word Quarterly, Vol.31, No. 3, 2010, pp 449-467