Saint Lucia is known to many as a resplendent island paradise of luminous white-sand beaches and rich tropical forests that spill into the Caribbean Sea. However, this magnificent fresco belies an often precarious living reality. The country’s tourism-dependent economy and heavy reliance on imports, coupled with its susceptibility to natural disasters, render it highly vulnerable to external shocks and trap many Saint Lucians in chronic insecurity. Saint Lucia’s female farmers and women in general find their development further impeded by deeply entrenched gender roles which limit their engagement in the formal sector and manifest in a vast wage gap of 27.4%  A 2020 World Bank estimate placed a woman’s lifetime productivity in Saint Lucia at just 63% of her potential.

Helen’s Daughters is a non-governmental organization (NGO) blending the empowerment of Saint Lucia’s women with its overall development. It trains and supports female farmers, viewing them as long-overlooked drivers of change.

The Roots of Helen’s Daughters

Keithlin Caroo, the organization’s founder, told the BBC that she established Helen’s Daughters to “address the systematic exclusion of rural women in the agricultural sector.” The strong concentration of women within the informal economy and the blurring of economic and non-economic activity on small-scale family farms have long shrouded their contributions to agriculture in Saint Lucia, limiting their access to support systems, resources and growth prospects.

In a podcast interview from February 2024, Caroo describes witnessing her grandmother’s contributions to the family’s agricultural business dematerialize as she listed her occupation as “housewife” on official records. She remembers thinking that, given more opportunity, she “would probably be one of the most successful farmers in the area”

Caroo recognized that Saint Lucia’s female farmers needed “an ecosystem of other women in farming and agriculture” and set out to create one. She points out that Helen’s Daughters exists “not to negate men’s roles in the field”, but to address “a developmental issue in the region” that confines women to the margins of the agricultural sector.

Training Programs for Saint Lucia’s Female Farmers

Since its inception in 2016, Helen’s Daughters has cultivated a thriving network of female farmers, reaching 1,200 women as of 2022. The NGO operates two training programs in Saint Lucia, as well as Saint Kitts and Nevis and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, which focus on sustainable agriculture, financial literacy, business development and marketing.

It also organizes guided commercial farm visits, where the women it serves can gain expert knowledge of sustainable and productivity-boosting farming practices. Furthermore, seeking to increase the visibility of Saint Lucia’s female farmers, Helen’s Daughters operates an agri-tourism experience, allowing visitors to learn firsthand about the women’s trials and successes through tours and markets.

In 2022, Helen’s Daughters partnered with global chocolate retailer Hotel Chocolat to establish the Agri-Apprenticeship Programme, which provides three women every year invaluable experience in managing a farm. They receive mentorship and training throughout the process and, upon completing the apprenticeship, can use start-up funds from Helen’s Daughters to establish their agricultural enterprise.

Caroo shared in a podcast that, “One of the critical and key areas of Helen’s Daughters is that seed of empowerment; of self-belief; of belief in yourself as an agricultural entrepreneur.” This focus on the nourishment of burgeoning female potential is pertinent in an economy where women engage heavily in entrepreneurship but where the vast majority of small businesses with limited growth capacity are woman-owned, according to the World Bank report.

Tilling Saint Lucia’s Socioeconomic Landscape

One of Helen’s Daughters’ major focuses is strengthening female farmers’ ability to engage in the economy. It organizes quarterly markets where women can grow their customer bases and establish firm roots within the sector through networking. In 2022, 95 of Saint Lucia’s female farmers benefited from this initiative and sales amounted to $37,415, according to Helen’s Daughters 2020 annual report. Helen’s Daughters also connects the rural women it supports to larger enterprises such as hotels and restaurants, allowing them to significantly boost their income.

This demonstrates a wider focus on Saint Lucia’s development. The Caribbean imports between 80% and 90% of its food.  However, in the podcast, Caroo points out that more than half of this produce could be grown locally. She believes Saint Lucia, and the region at large, to be “stuck in a very dangerous cycle” of dependency. Still recovering from the profound wound that the collapse in tourism triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic left in its economy, the country is now keenly feeling the sharp increase in import prices precipitated by the war in Ukraine. Helen’s Daughters’ integration of small-scale farmers into Saint Lucia’s economy is therefore testimony to a vision of increased resilience and autonomy for both the women it supports and for entire communities. As Caroo puts it, “If a nation cannot feed itself, it’s not free.”

Food Sovereignty and Health

Another facet of Helen’s Daughters’ commitment to “food sovereignty and health,” as Caroo pointed out in the podcast, of Saint Lucia is its focus on nutritional marketing within its training programs and its creation of a cooking channel showcasing local recipes and products. According to Caroo, the organization is teaching farmers how to capitalize on the fact that, currently, “health is trendy”, and is encouraging consumers to “recognize that there is value in food that’s locally available.”

Helen’s Daughters also holds quarterly wellness fairs. According to its website, these clinics allow rural people to access health information, dietary advice and checkups at no cost and pay homage to the farmers who work tirelessly to support their families at the expense of their own wellbeing.

Empowering Saint Lucia’s Female Farmers

Helen’s Daughters provides Saint Lucia’s female farmers with the tools they need to transform the island’s natural abundance into increased prosperity and agency for themselves, their families and their communities. At the organization’s core is a commitment to the living realities of rural communities, long masked by an image of tropical splendour but vibrant and beautiful in their own right.

– Leila Powles

Leila is based in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, UK and focuses on Global Health for The Borgen Project.

Photo: Flickr