Cape Verde women only holidays

What can you buy there? “Everything!” says Lidiana Mendes from our partner Travell With Purpose, who designed and runs the trip. “It’s a very small shop close to the farm; you can get things from the deli. Sometimes, Mirilene is there too. I love to go to her shop: I get a big bag full of vegetables and can cook with it for the whole week.”

Farmers on Santo Antao grow potatoes, cassavas, peppers, sweet potatoes, tomatoes, cabbage, bananas, mango and maize – as well as sugarcane, which is distilled into the heady island speciality grogue.

It’s tough work. There’s a reason why agriculture only accounts for around seven percent of Cape Verde’s GDP. High-rise terrain forces farmers to cultivate terraces, while the hot and dry Sahel climate and increasingly unpredictable weather patterns make droughts more common. Crops are small and irregular, clutching on to the fertile valleys and coast of the northern islands.

“Our richness in Cape Verde is fishing and agriculture, and unfortunately, more and more young people are losing interest in these industries,” says Lidiana. “Mirilene was raised in the valleys, running around as a child – she was brought up into that. This is why she is into farming, and she’d like to continue in it and inspire other women. She would love to see more young women doing it.”

Women’s holidays in Cape Verde support farmers like Mirilene. They go with the flow, tailored to the farmers’ schedules as much as possible so as not to disturb their work.

“We mostly want to adapt as much as possible to the environment – to local life and nature,” says Lidiana. “I think that if we want to work together with Mirilene and the other female farmers, it’s up to us to be as flexible as possible and get an agreement with them that they feel comfortable with, but also that lets them keep their identity. It’s never about changing their culture, but to highlight them.”

Women’s work also tends to be informal and without contracts. That’s great for enabling women to fit work around family commitments – women head up almost half the households in Cape Verde – but schedules and wages can be unfixed and unreliable. Over a third of women live in rural areas, so agriculture can provide vital work – however, the poverty rate for famers is twice the national average.

An African Development Bank report on gender in Cape Verde recognised that gender equality is essential to reducing poverty for people working in agriculture and fishing. One of their recommendations is to link up with the growing tourism industry to help female farmers create sustainable small businesses.

That’s exactly what women’s holidays in Cape Verde do. Lidiana is passionate about bolstering entrepreneurial women who work in agriculture. “We want to put more focus on the female farmers because they need it,” says Lidiana. “I feel like they deserve it, especially after the Covid-19 pandemic.”

Activities include hiking, meditation, stretching exercises and journaling sessions. A guide will focus on revealing the hiking trails, nature and culture of Cape Verde, while a facilitator with expertise in women’s wellness will guide the self-care programme. Accommodations are eco lodges that blend near seamlessly into the forests and coast.

As with the women’s empowerment holiday, the women’s only holidays flow with the needs of the community. In the past, Lidiana has worked with women in the fishing industry. Now, she introduces visitors to female farmers because the need is there. Hikes follow well-trod tracks to avoid chipping away at fragile forests recovering after being cleared for largescale colonial plantations. Lidiana also sticks to small group tours that positively impact mountain communities instead of swamping them and changing their ways.

“It’s important to be very critical of your own work that you do,” Lidiana concludes. “Because it’s very easy to say ‘responsible’. I always go back and evaluate because you can easily lose track of how sensitive your tours are.”

A local guide of any gender will lead the rest of the holiday, when you’ll explore extinct volcano craters, the green valleys of the Ribeira Grande and a traditional fishing town on neighbouring Sao Vicente island.

“The guides have a lot of experience in tourism and rural tourism, and they’re friendly as well,” says Lidiana. “It’s important that they are not only from Cape Verde but from the island that the holiday takes place on.”

Accommodations are guest houses run by islanders who’ll invite you to kick back in their book-filled lounge or join them on the shady garden porch for fresh mango juice.

“The work was mainly tourism there, so people left,” says Lidiana. “It’s another reason why we push for responsible tourism, because you can see now that the tourism businesses that suffered the bigger impacts were the ones that weren’t sustainable. Of course, we are all affected by it, but you can already see that the sector of responsible tourism is better at dealing with such an issue than a major resort that loses so much because they are all about fast money. We think about the long-term and have strong partnerships.”

Thankfully, the northern islands that Lidiana and Marilene live and work in are the backdrop of walking holidays and cultural tours that require lower temperatures. They were entering their low season when the Covid-19 pandemic started and, as agricultural and fishing islands, had an alternative (if small) source of income.

In the long term, responsible agritourism like the women’s empowerment holiday would help supplement farmers’ incomes – all the more important after the pandemic. A percentage of the money that you pay for the holiday is funnelled directly back into the female farming industry, funding more empowerment workshops and supporting small businesses.

“We want to be independent of the government because when there is government engagement, there are always different restrictions that we don’t always agree with and that we don’t find sustainable,” says Lidiana. “It’s not as easy to control things or see where the money goes. With small-term, direct impacts, the female farmers have more of a sense of their own product. They’re making a sale, they’re engaging in our workshop – and it’s long-term. You don’t have to do it in a year.”