How Better Cotton Helps To Promote Gender Equality
Hawes & Curtis is committed to improving cotton farming practices globally with the Better Cotton Initiative (BCI). By buying cotton products from us, you’re supporting more sustainable cotton farming. Learn more.
All over the world, farmers growing more sustainable cotton are benefiting from the real economic, social and environmental advantages it offers. None of this would have been possible without the influence of BCI. Here’s just one example of how Better Cotton has helped a female farm-worker in Pakistan to fulfil her dream of economic independence…
Following her mother’s footsteps, Ruksana Kausar married a cotton farmer when she was young. Like many women in her community — where cotton communities farm the land to survive — Ruksana works hard on her family’s cotton farm, sowing seeds, weeding the fields and picking cotton amid the searing heat of Punjab. Yet as a woman in rural Pakistan, where societal ingrained gender bias prevents women from being treated equally to men, she doesn’t participate in business decisions and has little say in how the farm’s profits are spent.