Coffee that Creates Jobs: Forest Conservation Opens Opportunities for Women in the Dominican Republic

On a wall at the La Esperanza Coffee Growers Association in the Dominican Republic hang portraits of its past presidents. All are men, except for the last and most recent one, which features a woman: Santa Julia Carmona. The image illustrates who decides on access to resources and the benefits generated by coffee. “You have to stand in front of hundreds of producers, each with their own story, context, and challenges, and you have to withstand that pressure. That is not for just anyone,” she says.

Because in the coffee‑growing regions of the Dominican Republic, coffee is not just a crop. It is the livelihood of entire communities, and the opportunity to study and live with dignity. Additionally, it is the lever through which Dominican women are forging their way forward.

A real livelihood

Isabel Robles Amador is 77 years old and has ten children, most of them professionals. Coffee made that possible. “That is what we live on today, and with that, we help our children,” she says. For Isabel, coffee growing has been the source of a real and independent livelihood.

However, she recalls that for years women worked throughout the entire value chain—harvesting, processing, coordinating labor, managing the household—without having access to any of the income it generated. “When the coffee was taken to be sold, it was as if women had no participation at all,” she recalls.

María Isabel Balbuena, founder of the Dominican Association of Women in Coffee, was one of the first to name this reality: “They worked throughout the entire chain. However, they were not owners, nor could they decide how to use the resources generated by coffee production. What they lacked was a voice.” Since then, she has spent three decades working to ensure that women are not only present in the value chain but also benefit from it.

Forest conservation also creates jobs

More than 50,000 families in the Dominican Republic depend on coffee growing for their livelihoods. High‑altitude coffee is one of the main generators of rural employment. Yisleny del Jesús, president of the San José de Ocoa Coffee Growers’ Cooperative, puts it in numbers: her cooperative alone includes 400 families, and each farm, no matter how small, requires at least three people during harvest season.

Her goal is to turn coffee into a sustainable business. “What we are looking for is for the watershed to be restored, but for the crop to be profitable so that producers do not have to cut down their coffee and plant something else. You have to plan it, dream it, do the math, and execute,” she explains.

Dominican coffee has a dimension that few industries can claim: its sustainable, shade‑grown cultivation among mountain forests ensures better bean quality and higher productivity, while also promoting a healthier environment. Each plantation represents more forest cover, more water for communities, and more opportunities for women and their families.

Celine Herrera Medina, a producer in Los Cacaos, describes it this way: “When I see a coffee plant, I get so excited because of how it protects the environment, but also how it produces water, how it mobilizes communities, how it impacts economic and social development.”

This link between coffee growing and conservation lies at the heart of the Dominican Republic’s Emissions Reduction Program, supported by the World Bank’s Forest Carbon Partnership Facility (FCPF). The mechanism is straightforward: the country receives financing for the tons of carbon emissions it avoids by keeping its forests standing.

Those resources are then channeled into technical training for producers, registration and traceability systems, and new sources of employment linked to sustainable land management—exactly the tools that women like Yisleny have been calling for for years. “Coffee is not a crop that causes deforestation,” she explains. “Go up into the mountains and see how covered they are. If I make the effort to keep that farm producing while also protecting water sources, then that is an incentive too.”

“The logic of the program turns that incentive into something tangible: conserving forests through sustainable land use stops being only an environmental value and becomes a concrete source of economic opportunities for the communities that protect them,” explains Katharina Siegmann, Senior Environmental Specialist at the World Bank.

Jobs that allow young people to stay in their communities

Melissa Núñez found her own way to extend the coffee value chain. The daughter of a coffee grower who maintained his farm “for sentimental value, but perhaps without a business outlook,” Melissa developed her university thesis on coffee and managed to bring her father back to the fields with a renewed vision. Today, in addition to producing coffee, they operate roasters and coffee shops, creating new jobs. “We are present throughout the entire value chain, from seed to cup,” she says.

However, the greatest risk to Dominican coffee growing is not pests or international prices. It is the lack of young labor. Daniela Alcántara is 23 years old and puts it bluntly: “Young people have to leave for the city because they don’t find opportunities here.” She chose to stay and gain training. “Is there a future in coffee? If we are supported, yes.”

That support—technical training, access to financing, and fair markets—translates into jobs and is precisely what the program’s financing aims to make available to rural communities. Altagracia Pujols, known as Nani, president of the Arroyo Manteca Coffee Growers Association and promoter of nurseries that have already distributed more than 20,000 plants among its members, sums it up pragmatically: “Together we can, especially if we find the helping hand of an institution.”

The portrait of the only woman president on that wall in La Esperanza will no longer be an exception. But for that to happen, coffee must continue to be what these women have already shown it can be: a sustainable business, a source of decent work, and a driver of development for communities that, by caring for the forest, are also caring for their own future.