An Interview with Connie Kolosvary, Director of Cafe Femenino (Part II)

Alika Magas | August 18, 2021

Connie was the one to initiate the new Zoom conference room this time around. I eagerly joined on my end, the digital hangout back up and running within a minute tops. The excitement and passion between the two of us was just too much; we jumped right back into talking.

Alika: Now, the interesting thing about all of this, as we discussed before, is that the cultural and social climate differs from country to country. Some governments are waking up to the disparity between men's and women's rights and, because of that, are now putting legislation in place to protect women and even help them obtain things formerly withheld—such as land rights. But in some countries, these policies have also come with loopholes which allow men to still hold power while appearing to benefit the women. (For some context: one of these primary "loopholes" is a concept called joint tilting. Boiled down, joint tilting refers to the practice where a women's name is present on a land-ownership document, making the land a joint venture and owned by both the man and the woman. But, because it is still underneath the man's primary control, women are often still pushed back into their gendered, domestic rolls; they technically have the power of owning land, but are not able to fully own the land themselves.) However, during some of our email conversations prior to this meeting you said loopholes haven't really affected Café Femenino's program. Can you talk to that a little bit?

Connie Kolosvary: I haven't had this question before, but I'd say it's because of the cooperative leaders we work with within these varying countries, we have great relationships with them, and they understand that the driving principle behind Cafe Femenino is to protect the status of the women as it relates to the land that they farm. I know that they, if anything, will step in and right things if anything goes a little sideways in the Cafe Femenino program. The members of the cooperatives are invested in the success of the program.

And those loopholes don't necessarily happen in every country. In Bolivia, the constitution was rewritten in 2009, giving women either equal or more substantial status in land ownership, depending. The president at the time was of indigenous heritage, so he understood things that were happening in the rural countryside that was not equitable. He worked to rebalance things to reduce poverty.

In the Dominican Republic several years ago, we had an interesting moment. A man who was one of the coffee farmers in the co-op attending the meeting responded when I asked the coop members: "Can anyone tell us some good things or some bad things you've experienced in this program? We really wanna hear them." And he raised his hand and explained how at that time if a husband died, the land would revert to the brother or the man's family. The wife and children would have to leave the farm. It became the community's responsibility to take care of them. And now, with Cafe Femenino, with the woman's name on the titles, the women were able to stay on the land and keep farming and keep things going. It was the best thing that he'd seen Cafe Femenino do because it helped everybody. Because the rest of the community wasn't financially stressed by having to support an extra family.

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Not every nation makes it easy for women to own land. This hampers the strength of the community. Women are better equipped to handle household finances, which is yet another way their empowerment ripples outwards. Since Café Femenino’s main goal is to create change at the community level by empowering women, politics can prove to be a massive barrier. Women may want to start a Café Femenino program but be barred from doing so by their own government.

Women of the Kokowagayo Cafe Femenino Program in Sumatra.

In Sumatra, one of the most well-known sources for coffee, women cannot enter contracts independently; it is forbidden by law. One way this law manifests is section 108 of Indonesia’s civil code dictates land cannot be purchased by a woman, making the concept of a women-own farm almost obsolete. And yet, Café Femenino, who requires the women farmers to own land, has a program in Sumatra.

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 A: In Sumatra it's just flat-out illegal for women to own land, for religious reasons. How was Cafe Femenino able to come in and establish a program there? Because if one of your requirements is the women have to own land, and they're legally barred from owning land…we really wanna know more about that.

 

C: Okay, now that was really cool. Yeah, it's one of the coolest things that has happened.

We have been doing work with a co-op in Sumatra since probably the mid-90s and it was an all men membership. They are in a part of Indonesia that is very strict, religiously speaking. My male colleague was there visiting our producer partners in the Gayo region and emailed me and said: "can you send me the manual for Cafe Femenino really quick?" So, I sent it and that was, I think, 2010 or something like that. Fast forward five years and out of the blue I receive an email from an all-woman cooperative called Kokowagayo located in the Gayo region of Sumatra. And they are inviting us to come and visit because they want a Cafe Femenino program in their co-op. They had just become a fair trade cooperative, their charter was just approved, and had just obtained their organic certification.

I said: "wow, that's cool! But we don't just, ya know, do it that way. We have to visit, we have to meet the cooperative members, we have to see if you can do the things required, and then we'll go from there. We will need to see if you're a good candidate." A few people we knew in the coffee industry who had been to Sumatra told us not to go, that it was too dangerous for the women farmers to have a program like Café Femenino, that it's not going to work, that the men might not welcome us, or that they aren't going to be able to fulfill the requirements.

I listened to that for five minutes, and I went home and was like: "no, if there's any place that needs Cafe Femenino, it's Sumatra. So, we're gonna go; we're gonna figure this out."

Anyway, we visit Sumatra and Kokowagayo, and we do our presentation, and they do theirs, and it truly is an all-women cooperative. It turns out that the general manager of the men's cooperative, his sister started the all-women cooperative. So, all the wives were in one cooperative and all the men and husbands in the other one. As they're doing the presentation for us, they're describing how they structured the cooperative, and it all lines up with the standards and criteria of Cafe Femenino.

I'm sitting there listening, and my mind was blown—it wasn't until later that I figured out the document I sent so many years before had found its way to them and—

How could I say no, right? They specifically designed their cooperative around the model of a Cafe Femenino Program.

The director of Kokowagayo, pictured left.

I said: "We're going to give this a year. I mean, there are different milestones we have to achieve, and this doesn't happen fast." So, we went back and forth over that year, and we hit the problem of land ownership. They asked if they could get an exception because of their cultural and religious situation. And I thought about that, but then I was like: "No, because that's the point of Cafe Femenino. It's that you do all the things, that's the hard part, that's what creates changes." So, I told them that we need to adhere to all the parts to make it fair to the other groups.

I had to put it back on them. I said: "You all come up with an idea, and let's talk again." It took another two months, but they came back with something brilliant. As a group, the women went down to the municipality with their husbands and had every one of the men sign a legal document giving 100% control of the piece of land the women needed over to their wives. And they sent us every single document, and every single one was stamped and recorded at the courthouse. And they asked: "Will this work?"

And I said: "Yes! You guys came up with a great solution here!" I mean, they were able to legally change the control of a piece of property by the husbands giving up control of it, legally, to their wives. Isn't that amazing? And crazy how that worked?

Alika: That is nuts! And I mean, it's perfect. We talked earlier about cases where governments find loopholes to keep men in power, but this community found a loophole to put the women in power.

 

C: Yeah, I thought it was so elegant and so powerful. Because, I mean, every man had to go to city hall and sign a document; official affidavits for every single piece of property giving over control of the land to their wives.

So, that's how they became our Sumatran Cafe Femenino Program – also, incidentally, the first all-female coffee co-op in Sumatra. Once they had achieved every requirement put forth, we introduced Cafe Femenino Sumatra Program coffee to North America. And those women — they just rock. They are a force to be reckoned with.  

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And just like that, our time together ended. Granted, it ended after some lovely chit-chat. Having burned through all our questions, Connie and I just wanted to hang out for a second and get to know each other. It was a moment where—even beyond all of the activism her job requires of her—I saw that Connie is, at her core, a caring individual. No wonder the work she does creates so much positive change; when you have someone that genuine in the bedrock of the organization, the work they do comes from a place of honesty and love. Café Femenino understands the challenges women farmers face in the coffee industry and they push them to succeed. When women are empowered, revolutionary change is inevitable.