Care4Ag

Investing in Care, Transforming Agriculture

Investing in Care in Costa Rica’s Coffee Cooperatives

Care4Ag is a Kore Global and Root Capital initiative, supported by International Development Research Centre (IDRC), testing whether cooperative investment in childcare can produce a triple win: better outcomes for children, greater economic agency for women, and stronger performance for the cooperative. The pilot is working with three Costa Rican coffee cooperatives, Coopetarrazú, Coopelibertad, and Aquiares, running from January through the end of 2026.

Costa Rica’s coffee is picked by hand, largely by migrant families who travel to the coffee regions for the season, many of them Indigenous Ngäbe-Buglé from Panama and workers from Nicaragua. Coffee cherries ripen in a narrow window, so having enough pickers at the right moment shapes the size of a cooperative’s harvest and its revenue. Climate change is making that timing less predictable, as erratic temperatures and rainfall shift when cherries ripen from season to season. Who is available to pick depends heavily on who is responsible for childcare, work that falls disproportionately on women. The harvest coincides with school closures, and without safe, affordable care, women face a hard choice: forgo paid work to stay with their children, or take the work and have their children spend the day in or near the fields.

The three pilot cooperatives’ response is a network of seasonal childcare centres known as Casas de la Alegría, “Houses of Joy,” spaces that are safe, supervised, and culturally responsive for the children of migrant harvesting families. Each Casa employs workers who care for children while their parents work, providing structured learning, hygiene routines, and regular meals throughout the day. The Casas address several needs at once: the shortage of manual labour at harvest, the goal of enabling women to earn an income, and the responsibility to keep children safe and out of the fields, helping prevent  child labour, which is illegal for children under 15 in Costa Rica. The Casas operate in coordination with the country’s public institutions, which co-fund nutritious meals, support worker training and certification, and provide public health services, including routine vaccinations.

All three cooperatives recognised the need and invested in childcare themselves, each running a system in some form. Keeping those services strong, improving conditions, and reaching more families takes continued investment. Funding comes from a mix of sources: investment from the cooperative or enterprise itself, public funding, and grant support. Through its Resilience Grants mechanism, Root Capital is distributing catalytic grants to each cooperative to bolster their childcare initiatives. Kore Global’s role is to build the evidence base on the benefits and return on investment (ROI) of treating care as an essential component of agricultural enterprise infrastructure.

The pilot set out to learn across three areas, and here are some of the early findings. 

Children’s health and wellbeing

During the 2025/2026 harvest the Casas de la Alegría cared for children across all three cooperatives, keeping them out of the coffee fields and reinforcing compliance with Costa Rica’s ban on work by children under 15.

• Coopetarrazú: 1,761 children cared for across 18 Casas. 
• Coopelibertad: 38 children cared for in one Casa. 
• Aquiares: up to 200 children at full capacity across two Casas inside the camp, over a longer six-month harvest.

Supervised health and hygiene routines and up to five meals a day produce reported gains in health and nutrition. The Casas also connect children to Costa Rica’s public health and child welfare services, so they receive routine medical care and stay up to date on vaccinations. Through the same coordination, families access nutrition support, including monthly formula milk for children under seven, and pregnant workers receive prenatal care.

Women’s economic empowerment

Women are earning a full harvest wage in their own name instead of forgoing income for unpaid care work. The Casas are also employing local women as caregivers, cooks, and supervisors, creating formal paid jobs and a route into leadership in communities where year-round work is scarce.

• Coopetarrazú: childcare enabled 365 women to join or stay in the harvest, close to one additional woman worker for every family served. The Casas also created 65 paid roles for women as caregivers, cooks, and supervisors, separate from the harvesting mothers.
• Coopelibertad: 19 mothers enabled to work, about 10% of the cooperative’s total harvest labour, from 38 children in care, roughly one mother for every two children.
• Aquiares: with the Casas removing the care constraint, mothers can take paid picking work in their own name, and women now make up about 40% of adult harvesters in the camp, up from a much smaller share before the Casas. The paid caregiver, cook, and supervisor roles are held by local Costa Rican women, a separate population from the Indigenous Ngäbe-Buglé mothers who travel from Panama for the harvest.

Enterprise performance

Initial ROI modelling points to a return of roughly 2.5 times the programme’s cost across the cooperatives, driven by stronger labour availability through the time-sensitive harvest window. This modelling is based on early data.

• Coopetarrazú: benefit-to-cost ratio of about 2.5x.
• Coopelibertad: an early, conservative range of about 1.75x to 2.8x for its first season.
• Aquiares: estimated at about 2.5x with modelled upside to roughly 3.9x. The return runs through retention across a six-month harvest that takes ten to fourteen selective picking passes per lot, where childcare and family housing hold the stable, returning workforce that secures the crop.

How the ROI figure is calculated:

The benefit-to-cost ratio compares total programme cost against the economic value of workers enabled to join the harvest, plus adjustments for productivity gains, reduced absenteeism, and avoided turnover. It draws on sector benchmarks as a starting point with site-specific payroll data as a next step.

These early results come from a pilot, and the next phase is about building on them. We plan to deepen the evidence base through further grants, loans, and research. That evidence will feed a stronger, more operational business case, a refined ROI tool, impact measurement frameworks, and case studies that show how care performs as an investment and how financial products can support it.

Together we also aim to take the model into new geographies and into value chains beyond coffee, testing the model in different contexts and across different enterprise models. As the evidence grows, the aim is to broaden outreach and engagement with like-minded investors and test what is possible for sustainable financing of care as an agricultural investment.

For more on the broader argument for treating care as agricultural infrastructure, read our blog, “Care is Agricultural Infrastructure: Building the Business Case for Financing Care.”

Full case studies, a learning paper, and videos are coming in October. Get in touch at contact@koreglobal.org if you’d like to get involved.