Lipton Partners With WE To Empower And Support Female Tea Farmers In Kenya

WE partners with underserved communities

The awesome way WE and Lipton are helping women farmers succeed

The leaves that go into your tea bags are harvested by thousands of women tea farmers in Kenya. They spend a large part of their day in the arid climate that is perfect for growing tea, combing through miles of verdant bushes on the tea farms, many of which are right by their houses.

When it rains — almost every late afternoon to early evening — the area is steeped in rich smells of the tea leaves as well as jasmine and eucalyptus. It may sound like a refreshingly simple life, but many of the women are looking for just a little bit more.

Thankfully, almost 20 years ago, WE Charity — a nonprofit that partners with underserved communities to provide the financial literacy tools and leadership program they need to create change — started to work with people in the Maasai Mara region and is expanding in order to partner with tea farmers and Lipton to give them just that.

Maasai Mara, also known as simply “The Mara” to locals, is in Narok County, Kenya. It connects to the Serengeti National Park in the Mara Region of Tanzania and is home to a wide spectrum of wildlife including lions, cheetahs, elephants, zebras, hippos, wildebeests, spotted hyenas, and over 500 species of birds.

The people in Maasai Mara depend on its fecund environment as much as the animals living there, but, thanks to groups like WE, they’ve got more than that to sustain them.

Program participants will learn financial fundamentals from budgeting and cost-pricing to creating business plans and applying for loans in addition to:

Financial literacy including communication, bookkeeping and loan distribution
Leadership fundamentals like conducting corporate elections, drafting policies and establishing group constitutions
Entrepreneurship tools from marketing to pricing
Health management, including stress and substance abuse education

Powered by WE’s ‘Track Your Impact’ promise, tea drinkers can help support the program by purchasing their favorite Lipton product with a Track Your Impact sticker. Each sticker has a code that consumers can enter on we.org/Lipton to see exactly where and how every purchase has made an impact on women’s tea farming communities. Lipton’s Track Your Impact products are available now at grocery retailers nationwide while supplies last.

“We are proud to have the opportunity to support the women tea farmers in Kenya, and are keen to let people know that their Lipton purchase makes a difference in these women’s lives,” said George Hamilton, Tea Director at Unilever. “Our goal is to help them build a cycle of learning, sharing, and empowerment within their communities that will help future generations of Kenyan families.”

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