Power Shift: What Happens When Women Own the Value Chain?

by Oya Foods July 29, 2025

Across the globe, women are the unseen force behind the food we eat. From growing and harvesting to processing, trading, and cooking, women play a critical role in the food system. Yet despite this, they remain underrepresented in ownership, leadership, and decision-making across the agricultural and food value chain.

In the face of intersecting challenges—climate change, food insecurity, supply chain disruptions, and the rising demand for ethical sourcing—there’s a growing recognition that investing in women isn’t just the right thing to do. It’s the smart thing to do. Building women-owned value chains is not only a matter of equity, but a strategic lever for creating more resilient, inclusive, and future-fit food systems

Why Women-Owned Value Chains Matter

A value chain is the full journey a product takes from raw material to final consumer. In the food sector, this includes farming, storage, processing, distribution, retail, and beyond. Women are deeply involved in each of these stages—but often in roles that are informal, underpaid, or overlooked. When women are positioned as owners, decision-makers, and leaders across the chain, the ripple effects are transformational.

Studies show that when women have economic power, they reinvest up to 90% of their income into their families and communities (compared to 30–40% for men), driving better outcomes in health, education, and livelihoods (World Bank, 2012). And when they lead businesses, they tend to prioritise sustainability, fairness, and long-term value.

Shifting from participation to ownership across the food value chain can unlock a different kind of growth—one that is more inclusive, more ethical, and more attuned to the needs of people and planet.

The Shift Women-Owned Value Chains Are Driving

Women-owned value chains do more than create equitable opportunities—they challenge the very structure of how industries function:

They reshape power dynamics. Traditional supply chains tend to concentrate profit and decision-making in the hands of a few. Women-owned value chains redistribute power across the ecosystem—from growers and processors to innovators and retailers.
They shift business priorities. These models often centre care, sustainability, and community—disrupting extractive, profit-only approaches with regenerative and values-driven practices.
They build visibility for the invisible. Women have long operated in informal food systems. Women-owned value chains formalise these networks, giving them structure, dignity, and economic power.
They unlock hidden markets. By connecting underutilised resources—like indigenous knowledge, informal labour, and micro-enterprise networks—to formal supply chains, women-owned models reveal new value that traditional systems often overlook.

In short, they don’t just insert women into the value chain—they redefine how value is created and who gets to own it.

Beyond Food: Emerging Across Industries

While women are highly active in agricultural production, the sector remains behind when it comes to women owning and leading full value chains—from land and inputs to processing, branding, and access to formal markets. There are pockets of progress in other industries, proving their potential to disrupt and regenerate :

In fashion and textiles, cooperatives like Soko Kenya and artisan platforms like Nest enable women to own production from fibre to final product, challenging fast fashion with traceable, ethical models
In natural beauty, women’s collectives across West Africa now harvest, process, and export ingredients like shea and marula, reclaiming control over products they’ve historically supplied without reward.
In renewable energy, organisations like Solar Sister train women to distribute and maintain solar products, putting them at the centre of last-mile energy delivery and ownership.

These examples show that when women own value chains, they build models that are inclusive, resilient, and future-facing—and they do it while bringing others along.

The Barriers Still Standing

Despite the progress, structural barriers remain:

Access to land and finance: According to the FAO’s 2023 report on women in agri-food systems, women account for over 40% of the agricultural labour force in developing countries, yet own less than 20% of farmland and receive less than 10% of agricultural credit
Time poverty and unpaid work: Social norms often limit the time, mobility, and risk-taking women can afford.
Exclusion from formal markets: Many women-led businesses are locked out due to lack of scale, certification, or visibility.
Policy blind spots: Few trade, finance, or agriculture policies are gender-responsive by design.
Addressing these challenges requires systemic solutions—intentional policies, inclusive infrastructure, gender-lens investing, and procurement pathways that give women-owned enterprises the footing to thrive.

What It Takes to Scale Women-Owned Value Chains

The shift to women-led systems can’t happen in silos. It takes a coordinated effort across sectors:

Corporate procurement policies that prioritise women-owned suppliers
Gender-smart investment funds for scalable women-led agribusinesses
Platforms and alliances that build visibility, access to markets, and peer networks
R&D and innovation funding directed toward women’s enterprises and local solutions
Storytelling and consumer education that increases demand for ethically sourced, women-led products

The end goal? Not just to “empower women” in the system—but to transform the system itself.

How Oya Foods is Building a Women-Owned Value Chain

At Oya Foods, our vision is to build an end-to-end value chain powered by women—from the soil to the shelf. But for us, it’s not just about bringing African-grown, nutrient-rich ingredients to market. It’s about amplifying what women are already growing, in the ways they’ve long known how to grow it, and meeting them where they are—not where conventional systems expect them to be.

We work alongside women farmers, processors, suppliers, and food innovators—not to impose external standards, but to elevate their knowledge, their crops, and their methods. Many of these women have been cultivating nutrient-dense indigenous foods using low-input, climate-resilient practices that align naturally with global sustainability goals—yet their value has too often been overlooked or marginalised by Western-dominated food systems.

Through sourcing crops like sweet potato and amaranth leaves from women-led cooperatives, offering dehydration services that unlock on-farm value, and curating products in partnership with women-owned brands, we’re creating pathways for these foods- and the women behind them -to reach broader markets without losing their story, their identity, or their voice.

Our approach is grounded in respect, reciprocity, and regeneration. We’re not just building a value chain—we’re co-creating a future where African food culture, women’s labour, and local knowledge are centred, celebrated, and equitably rewarded. We believe the future of food is collaborative, circular, and community-driven. And women must be at the heart of it.

Final Thought

Women-owned value chains don’t just “add” women into existing systems — they reimagine the system itself. That’s what makes them disruptive. They blur the lines between producer and owner, social and commercial value, local and global. And they offer a powerful blueprint for industries seeking to become more inclusive, ethical, and resilient — from food to fashion to energy.

In a world searching for more sustainable and equitable ways of doing business, women-owned value chains aren’t just progress. They’re the future.