When Kore Global and IDB Invest convened leaders from Ecuador’s flower, banana, vegetable, and shrimp sectors in Quito and Guayaquil to discuss care in their agribusinesses, the conversation moved quickly beyond policy compliance. What emerged was a frank reckoning with a challenge hiding in plain sight: the invisible weight of unpaid care work is quietly undermining the productivity, stability, and competitiveness of Ecuadorian agribusiness — and the companies that have started to take this challenge seriously are already seeing measurable returns.
The sessions brought together a diverse group of agribusiness representatives to explore how care responsibilities — childcare, elder care, and support for family members with disabilities — affect workers and operations alike. The headline finding was unambiguous: care is not a peripheral social issue. It is a material business risk. And treating it as one is the difference between a company that struggles with chronic absenteeism and turnover, and one that reduces staff attrition.
Women are essential to agribusinesses, but unpaid care work constrains them
In Ecuador, women spend 52.4 hours per week on unpaid care and domestic work, compared to just 13.72 hours for men. These are not just statistics — they are a structural drag on workforce participation, and agribusinesses absorb the cost whether or not they track it.
Women make up more than half the workforce in crops such as flowers, coffee, fruits, and vegetables, prized for their precision and reliability in labour-intensive tasks, including harvesting, selection, and packaging. Yet, as roundtable participants described, the care responsibilities that await them at home each evening significantly challenge their well-being, making consistent, full employment difficult to sustain.
The testimony from the banana sector was particularly vivid. Female workers frequently begin shifts at dawn or work into the night, returning home to find their children already asleep, unable to help with homework or simply be present. In the shrimp and packing industries, many women are single mothers with no safe or affordable childcare alternative. Participants described mothers monitoring their young children via mobile phone cameras while on the production floor — a makeshift solution that speaks to the scale of the gap between workers’ needs and available support.
“These mothers… leave their young children alone… the [women working in the packing facility] have very limited resources, and you know what they invest in? They invest in cameras. They leave cameras set up [at home and] are monitoring them from their cell phones… little ones of 7 or 9 years old are left alone, exposed.” (Roundtable participant)
Cultural pressures compound the challenge. In some rural communities efforts to improve women’s financial independence are met with resistance at home — what participants called “husband backlash” — meaning that progress made inside the workplace can be undone the moment a woman returns to a domestic environment that has not shifted alongside her. As one participant observed, workshops on empowerment can leave women feeling motivated, only for them to arrive home to a household where the decision-making structure and unpaid care work distribution make none of it applicable. The implication for businesses is significant: workplace care initiatives work best when they are connected to broader community and cultural change.
The operational impact of care: What the data shows
Absenteeism figures from companies at the roundtable revealed a pronounced gender split: while about 70% of male absenteeism is linked to accidents from sport or hobbies, 70% of female absenteeism is attributable to caring for family members. Despite this observation of the impact of care needs on absenteeism, most companies represented at the roundtables acknowledged they do not yet have consolidated caregiver data. Absenteeism is tracked; the reasons are often recorded, but the cross-referencing of absence data with care responsibilities rarely happens. As one participant put it, senior management frequently resists care initiatives precisely because they cannot see the link between an employee’s childcare crisis and a productivity dip two days later. The data exists in different parts of the organisation — it simply hasn’t been integrated.
This is starting to change. One company represented at the roundtable described plans to add a dedicated caregiver identification field to its SAP onboarding system, allowing it to build, for the first time, a structured picture of which employees have care responsibilities. Critically, this initiative was estimated to cost almost nothing beyond staff time. The barrier to gathering this information is rarely financial — it is organisational will and the know-how to ask the right questions sensitively.
Relatedly, participants emphasised that care-related questions can feel invasive, particularly when they come from HR or talent departments, where employees may fear the information will affect their performance evaluations. Several companies had found that routing these conversations through social welfare workers — who are seen as supportive rather than evaluative — produced far better results. The angle of approach matters as much as the question itself.
What works: Organisational care practices that deliver results
The roundtables were not merely a catalogue of problems. Participants shared concrete initiatives that have produced tangible results — and the outcomes are compelling.
Coupon Book of Hours (Cuponera de Horas). One dairy product company introduced what it calls a “coupon book” of flexible time: operational staff receive eight hours per month to use for personal and family needs, taken in coordination with their direct supervisor. The effect has been a significant reduction in unannounced absences and last-minute no-shows — disruptions that are disproportionately costly in time-sensitive agricultural operations such as harvesting and packing. Crucially, the scheme also generated reciprocity: when production pressures required staff to extend shifts or cover additional hours, employees were far more willing to do so, having already received flexibility in return. Reception among staff was strongly positive, with the benefit rated as meaningful even though it is non-monetary.
Expanding women workers into higher-value field roles. In the banana industry, one company identified desoje (leaf stripping) — a field task historically performed only by men — as suitable for women. The work carries no safety risk and requires no heavy equipment. By opening this role to women, the company achieved two things simultaneously: women were able to earn higher piece-rate wages, and — because the task can be completed by early afternoon — they gained time to be at home with their children. What began as a gender equity initiative delivered a care outcome without any additional cost to the business.
Turnover transformed. One frozen fruit company described reducing staff turnover from 11% to 0.36% over eighteen months — an outcome attributed to a sustained package of care-related benefits, welfare investment, and engagement. At a company with thousands of employees, the recruitment, onboarding, and productivity costs associated with that level of turnover reduction are substantial.
Why companies are struggling to go further
Despite these successes, care integration across the sector remains nascent. Participants identified a range of barriers that help explain the slow pace of change.
The most fundamental challenge identified was cultural. Senior management often resists care initiatives because they are not seen as within a business’s professional remit. Care is perceived as a private family matter. One participant noted that they had encountered directors who, when presented with proposals for childcare support, responded simply: “These are not my children. Why should I worry about their daycare?” Without C-suite ownership, care programmes stagnate as isolated HR experiments rather than becoming embedded in operational strategy.
Regulatory ambiguity makes matters worse. Ecuador legally requires daycares for companies with more than 100 employees, but the regulation is sufficiently unclear — and the infrastructure sufficiently complex to establish — that some companies have simply calculated whether the fine is cheaper than compliance, and opted to pay it. This is not cynicism; it reflects genuine obstacles. Agricultural environments present real safety risks: exposure to chemicals and heavy machinery makes safe on-site childcare provision complex to implement. One company described trying to formalise a public-private partnership with municipal childcare centres, only for the initiative to stall on a legal technicality around financial transfers to public entities.
Geographic dispersion adds another layer of complexity. For companies with operations across dozens of remote centres, the logistics and cost of delivering consistent care support are prohibitive for a single business. What is affordable and scalable in a city becomes a significant challenge when workers travel from multiple dispersed communities.
Finally, the sector faces a broader structural challenge that makes retention ever more urgent: a generational labour shortage. The migration of younger workers away from agricultural employment has left a workforce with an average age above 45. Keeping experienced people is becoming increasingly critical — and care support, as the turnover data shows, is one of the most effective tools available.
What investors and multilateral banks can do
For individual company initiatives to scale into sector-wide change, roundtable participants were clear that impact investors and multilateral lenders need to become active partners — not just in financing, but in building the case and lowering the cost of adoption. Several concrete ideas emerged from the discussions.
A “Care Seal” or corporate recognition programme linked to preferential credit access would create a direct financial incentive for adoption. If companies that implement formal care strategies qualify for better borrowing terms from multilateral lenders, care becomes not just ethically desirable but commercially rational. Participants observed that the “Fear of Missing Out” effect is a great motivator: once peer companies are seen pursuing a certification or seal, others follow — not out of conviction, but out of competitive instinct. That dynamic can be harnessed.
Technical assistance to build measurement capability is equally important. Many companies lack the tools to demonstrate the return on investment of care initiatives to their own boards. Supporting investees to build impact management and measurement frameworks — ones that explicitly cross-reference care provision with productivity and retention data — would both build the evidence base and shift leadership attitudes. The companies at the roundtable that had managed to win management support had done so with data: a diagnosis, an impact matrix, measurable outcomes. The pathway to board buy-in runs through numbers.
Better data collection guidance is a more modest but practical ask. Participants noted that surveys on care burdens can feel intrusive if poorly designed, causing workers — particularly those in agricultural supply chains — to withhold information or disengage. Guidance on how to ask questions that uncover genuine needs without generating suspicion or raising unfulfillable expectations would help companies gather the data they need to act.
Public-private infrastructure partnerships are needed for viable care solutions. For small-scale producers and rural communities, the capital cost of childcare infrastructure is prohibitive for any single company. Facilitating partnerships between businesses, local government, and community organisations to build shared external childcare infrastructure would distribute the cost and reduce individual liability — making care investment viable beyond the largest agribusinesses.
The bottom line
The roundtables in Quito and Guayaquil produced a finding that should reframe how the agribusiness sector thinks about care: this is not philanthropy. Companies that have invested in flexible time schemes, community health alliances, and expanded roles for women are not reporting social outcomes alongside their financial results — they are reporting them as their financial results. Turnover at near-zero. Workers who stay for decades. Communities that protect the business during a national strike.
Care initiatives work when they are integrated into core management models rather than bolted on as social responsibility afterthoughts. The evidence from Ecuador is clear: when employees feel their care needs are supported, their sense of belonging and productivity increase — and the business benefits follow.
The question for agribusinesses — and for the investors who back them — is no longer whether there is a business case for investing in care, but rather how to do so in a viable, impactful, context-specific, and sustainable way.