Indigenous women are driving a brighter future for blackberry production in Honduras

09/03/2026

Before the sun rises, María Martínez is already awake. In her community of Palo Blanco, in the municipality of Guajiquiro, the day starts early, especially during blackberry harvest season.

“We get up at four or five in the morning to go pick blackberries. We spend the whole day there,” she says.

María is an Indigenous Lenca woman, a mother, and a rural producer. She grows blackberries, maize, and beans, and raises chickens and turkeys. Like her, hundreds of women in Guajiquiro depend on blackberries to make a living. This fruit, which grows among forests and family plots, represents one of the main sources of income for women in the area.

Guajiquiro is a mountainous municipality, cold and green, where coffee and blackberries stretch across the hillsides. According to the latest estimates from Honduras’ National Statistics Institute (INE), the municipality has 15 495 inhabitants, of whom 7 965 are women, representing 51.4 percent of the population. One hundred percent of the population is rural, and most belong to the Indigenous Lenca people. Daily life is closely tied to the land, forests, and water sources.

However, for years, the hard work behind the harvest did not always translate into better income or improved living conditions.

“Blackberry farming is very costly work. Sometimes we have to pay for help to harvest, and even then, they pay us very little for it,” María explains. Selling to intermediaries, lack of price information, limited access to markets, and women’s low participation in business decisions long shaped the productive reality.

This situation began to change when the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) started its first outreach efforts in Guajiquiro under the Rural Women’s Empowerment and Environmental Sustainability Acceleration Programme. This regional initiative seeks to strengthen the economic, social, and environmental autonomy of rural women by promoting sustainable livelihoods, gender equality, and biodiversity conservation.

In Honduras, the programme works with Indigenous and rural communities in value chains such as blackberries, coffee, and tule reeds, in coordination with local governments, national institutions, and community organizations. In Guajiquiro, the first step was to ensure that women participated from the very beginning in defining the actions to be implemented.

To that end, before launching any productive or training activities, FAO promoted a consultation process aimed at securing Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC) with Lenca women producers from the communities of El Bajillal, El Pinar, Palo Blanco, and Pasguare. The process was carried out in accordance with FAO’s Indigenous and Tribal Peoples Policy and international standards, particularly ILO Convention No. 169.

“For me, it was a great satisfaction when they explained that there had to be a process so blackberries could be sold at a better price and to teach us different things,” María recalls.

During community assemblies, women were able to fully inform themselves about the programme, deliberate collectively, express what they expected from it, and under what conditions they wanted to participate. In those spaces, they discussed environmental and productive challenges, such as the low value placed on the fruit and their dependence on intermediaries for marketing.

The process culminated in the signing of the Free, Prior and Informed Consent Agreement, signed by women representatives from each community, FAO, and the Guajiquiro municipal government. This agreement marked a milestone by establishing that women would play a leading role in planning and implementing activities, while jointly defining priorities and commitments for work in the territory.

Based on this agreement, the programme began implementing Farmer Field Schools with a gender-transformative approach, a key component of the support FAO provides alongside communities and partners. This approach engages women, men, and communities in training processes aimed at influencing gender roles and empowering women.

Through these training spaces, women will strengthen their technical capacities in sustainable production, agroecological blackberry management, and livelihood diversification. At the same time, these spaces will facilitate collective analysis and reflection on the social norms and gender roles that have limited women’s participation in the value chain, promoting greater shared responsibility, empowerment, and effective participation in decision-making.

Today, María and other Lenca women in Guajiquiro are moving forward with a clear expectation: to build a blackberry value chain that is fairer, more inclusive, and more climate-resilient, based on recognition of their work, their right to decide over their territory and future, and the guarantee of a better life for themselves and their communities.

Women farmers play a decisive role in ensuring food security, improving nutrition, and eradicating poverty. For this reason, the United Nations General Assembly declared 2026 the International Year of the Woman Farmer.

Through this Programme, María and her community are gaining empowerment by improving the well-being of women and their households, reducing hunger, and boosting income generation and economic growth, while strengthening the resilience of their communities.