Women in coffee, changing the World:
Elvira’s story for International Women’s Day tells us how she became a coffee producer and developed leadership skills.

She learned how to grow and sell coffee in the Verapaz Region, among the unspoiled forests and mountains of Guatemala, where her own plantation lies. And now, thanks to her first harvests, Elvira Mó Salam has become part of an historic shift: she has developed an autonomous source of income that allows her to contribute independently to her family’s prosperity.

Elvira is 40 years old and lives with her husband and three children in the village of San Lucas Chiacal in Guatemala, part of the indigenous and ethnically Mayan Poqomchi’ community. Today, the community consists mainly of women as a result of over 30 years of civil war and ethnic cleansing, which has decimated the population and impoverished the area. This is where Elvira took part in one of our Foundation’s projects to train female coffee-producers and help them to develop their own leadership skills. “My husband encouraged me to start up a project of my own, and gave me 1,600 square metres of land to work with, where there had been nothing but weeds and brambles”, she recalls with a note of pride in her voice. “I started sowing my first 500 coffee plants 3 years ago. Today, I can see the fruits of my labour”.

Since her first harvest, Elvira has produced around 30 kilos of top-quality green coffee, which she has had depulped and dried. In addition to farming sustainably, she has begun recording her harvests and sales in order to plan how to manage future crops: an entrepreneurial approach that she learned thanks to her participation in the  “Coffee to be Reborn” project set up in 2016 by our Foundation in collaboration with the local NGO Verdad y Vida, so that a group of courageous and resourceful women could bring family coffee-growing businesses back to life. Today, 140 women like Elvira have made enormous strides in the production and marketing of coffee, with a positive impact on their own lives and the life of their community, which numbers over 1,000 people.

An emphasis on including and emancipating women is one of the goals of the projects promoted by the Lavazza Foundation in fragile states like Guatemala. Here, women working with dedication and determination as small coffee-producers help to improve the quality of life of their own families and of their communities. It is their commitment to inspiring future generations in the coffee-growing community that we want to celebrate today, on the occasion of International Women’s Day.

“I teach my children how to make the most of the resources that we have, so that we can all take on the future with dignity”.