Building Dreams, Advancing Equality: Relung Indonesia Facilitates GALS Training for 61 Women in Tanggamus

Tanggamus, Lampung – February 2025. Amidst the lush hills of coffee plantations and the tireless spirit of rural women, Relung Indonesia created an extraordinary learning space. From February 21 to 24, 2025, a total of 61 female representatives from 22 Women Farmer Groups (Kelompok Wanita Tani/KWT) across Ulu Belu, Pulau Panggung, and Air Naningan subdistricts participated in the Gender Action Learning System (GALS) training.

This initiative is part of the Empowering Women Coffee Farmers program a collaboration between Relung Indonesia, GIZ, and Nestlé aimed at strengthening rural women’s capacity as key actors in social and economic transformation.

GALS: When Women Learn to Know Themselves and Design Their Future

GALS training is no ordinary workshop. It invites women to deeply reflect on their lives — not only as wives, mothers, or farmers, but as individuals with rights, voices, and dreams.

GALS is a participatory, visual-based learning method. Through drawing and dialogue, participants mapped out:

• Their personal and business aspirations
• Challenges faced at home and within their groups
• Assets and strengths they already possess
• Concrete steps to realize their visions

The women were divided into groups based on their business focus — from banana chips and palm sugar to candied fruits and crispy snacks. Each group created a visioning roadmap, outlining their current conditions, the obstacles they face, and strategic actions to achieve their goals, both individually and collectively.

Reflecting Reality: When Women Map the Double Burden

One of the most powerful sessions was the daily cycle mapping activity. Here, participants compared the daily routines of women, men, widowers, widows, and teenagers.

The result was revealing yet familiar: women start their day earlier, sleep later, and shoulder a greater load of both domestic and income-generating tasks. In contrast, men tend to have more rest and lighter domestic responsibilities.

Discussions delved deeper into issues such as access to information, control over productive assets, exclusion from decision-making, social stigma, and gender-based violence. These are no longer abstract “gender issues” they are everyday realities that have long been normalized and unspoken.

Guided by skilled trainers, participants began not only to recognize these inequalities, but also to propose solutions: fair distribution of household duties, better communication within families, and women’s empowerment in public and community spaces.

Mapping Business: Turning Hopes into Plans

GALS also provided space for participants to map their business challenges and opportunities, including:

• Lack of production tools
• Limited access to capital and markets
• Minimal exposure to training and business licensing
• Social barriers like mobility restrictions, stigma, or lack of family support

Yet beyond these hurdles, they discovered powerful internal assets: spirit, solidarity, skills, and mutual support among fellow women.

Through group discussions, several concrete and ambitious business plans emerged:

• Applying for business licenses (NIB, PIRT, halal certification)
• Redesigning packaging to increase product appeal and marketability
• Establishing savings and loan cooperatives as internal funding sources
• Promoting products through social media and local e-commerce
• Accessing additional training from government or private sector partners

Some groups even listed going on Umrah (pilgrimage) together as a collective dream a powerful vision born from solidarity and shared purpose.

Reflection, Evaluation, and a Commitment to Move Forward

On the final day, participants took a post-training assessment and engaged in an emotional reflection session by placing feeling stickers a symbolic gesture of how deeply the training touched their hearts and awakened their awareness.

Many shared that this was the first time they had openly talked about their workloads, household challenges, or personal dreams. The training became a safe and liberating space — not just to learn from the trainers, but to learn from one another.

They left not just with notebooks and vision maps, but with a renewed understanding of their rights as women, their potential as community changemakers, and the collective strength they hold as a supportive sisterhood of entrepreneurs.

Relung Indonesia: Planting Hope, Cultivating Equality

As an organization with years of experience working alongside rural women, Relung Indonesia believes that economic empowerment cannot be separated from gender awareness. When women are given space to learn, speak, and dream, they create real, lasting change in households, in farming groups, and in village policies.

This GALS training represents just one part of Relung’s long-term commitment to building capacity, expanding access, and fostering gender equality in coffee-producing and rural communities. We believe that when one woman is empowered, an entire community begins to thrive.

Contributor:

Shella