The Bigger Picture: Women GROW the Future

Picture a family. A mother and father sit together on a bench. Their son sits beside them, and their daughter sits on the floor. They are smiling.

It’s a familiar image, easy to gloss over as simply “a loving family.” But it also raises a harder question: what assumptions are embedded in what we see—and more importantly, what do we NOT see?

As Opportunity International’s Senior Director of Agriculture Finance Strategy and Client Success, I spend a lot of my time thinking about hidden barriers to opportunity. When you’re working alongside people living in extreme poverty, a lack of income is just the most visible constraint. The deeper you go, the clearer it becomes that many obstacles have little to do with money at all.

I want us to sit with those hidden barriers, especially in agriculture. A few numbers to remember:

• Smallholder farmers produce roughly one-third of the world's food
• Unequal access to resources and information drives a 24% productivity gap between women and men farmers
• Women in agricultural employment are paid nearly 20% less than men

And the implications go far beyond fairness. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, closing these gaps in farm productivity and agricultural wages could add nearly $1 trillion to global GDP and reduce food insecurity by 45 million people.

So why do solutions still feel so out of reach?

If we want to end extreme poverty and hunger, women farmers need to thrive—full stop.

That’s exactly what Opportunity’s GROW (Guaranteeing Rural Opportunities for Women) strategy is designed to do within our Agriculture Finance program: deliberately approach how we work alongside farmers and how we partner with financial institutions.

Walking Alongside Women Farmers

One of the clearest lessons we’ve learned is simple: women farmers listen to, and learn from, women farmers. That’s why our Farmer Support Agent (FSA) model matters. We engage and equip local lead farmers and work alongside them to strengthen peer learning networks within their communities.

Early on, our work followed the usual path, engaging existing leadership structures. Our teams were mostly men. Our FSAs were mostly men. The result was predictable: women were left out.

So, our teams began shifting our strategy, intentionally engaging women farmers and women leaders, and strengthening our teams’ ability to design with women farmers, not just for them. In many places, that also means strengthening women-led Village Savings and Loan Associations (VSLAs) and working with them on a graduation pathway into formal cooperatives, with stronger leadership, clear business plans, and direct connections to financial institutions. When women organize through cooperatives, they not only aggregate produce for better earnings, but also build collective power and influence.

Incentivizing Inclusive Finance

Led by 28 local financial institutions and teams across seven countries, our AgFinance network has helped mobilize over $680 million to smallholder farmers. Through our Community of Practice, financial institution leadership and staff are sharing learnings and best practices. We’re reconsidering product design, incentives, staff composition, and marketing so that women farmers are not an afterthought, but central to how agricultural finance works.

In one of our discussions, we looked at the simple image of the family we started with today—son on the bench, daughter on the floor—and realized it had been created without questioning the assumptions embedded in it. Even small details like that reflect how systems are designed and who they center. Exercises like this help people see what was previously invisible to them. And once those assumptions are visible, it can shift how individuals, families, and leaders perceive entire business models—from marketing, to risk, to product design, and ultimately to who financial services are built for.

Those conversations across our network are already producing real change, and shifting actual business operations—including:

• Equity Rwanda launching a new savings product tailored for women and youth
• NBS in Malawi expanding lending to agricultural cooperatives

Asking the Right Questions

This work is about people, but it is rooted in systems, and that starts with us. It starts by examining where our assumptions show up in how we recruit, hire, train, retain, design, learn, and measure success.

It begins with questioning what’s been treated as “normal.” If a Farmer Support Agent has a baby, what support exists? If someone’s mobility is limited, how do we rethink their participation? If training happens when women are expected to be at home, how can we change, and invite families and decision-makers to change with us?

That’s what GROW is: a practical commitment to keep noticing what’s unseen, asking better questions of ourselves and the systems we operate within. Our work needs to focus on the challenges and strengths of the people we serve, so we can keep moving closer to a world without extreme poverty.