How Gabriela became a school meals provider

Gabriela Moyon bid for a government contract for the first time in her life, and in March 2026, she won. She will spend the next two years supplying school meals to Ecuador's Ministry of Education, preparing quinoa burgers and plant-based sandwiches from a kitchen in Quito. For a small producer, a two-year government contract is more stable than the open market: the buyer is known, the price is fixed, and the income is predictable.

But before winning that contract, she was one of thousands of women shut out of this market. “I used to think winning a government contract was very difficult and expensive, and that opportunities were only available through connections,” she said. “I didn’t understand how to use the SERCOP platform (Servicio Nacional de Contratación Pública, in english: National Public Procurement Authority) or how the system worked.”

That gap is what the SheTrades Gender-Responsive Public Procurement (GRPP) project set out to close. The project aims to deliver innovative solutions to help Ecuadorean women in agricultural value chains benefit from government procurement opportunities. The initiative of the International Trade Centre (ITC) is funded by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) and supported by Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH under the iA4g fund.

Over four years, the project trained 3,108 women through 72 workshops across 33 cities and 16 provinces. It worked through partners already trusted in each community – provincial governments, ministries and networks of cooperatives. It also published a step-by-step guide, Vende al Estado: Pasos Claves para Mujeres en la Agricultura, in Spanish, Kichwa and Shuar.

“A clear legal definition of a women-led business gives institutions a common standard and makes progress measurable”, Linda Marisol Cruz of the Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock and Fisheries, stated. “But from the Ministry's work with rural women in Ecuador, we know the definition alone is not enough. Training, technical support and access to information are what turn recognition on paper into real opportunity.”

For Gabriela, the lesson is one she now passes on to others.

“It starts with believing you can do it. If I could do it, so can you. Let's keep learning, seek out training, ask for help, and remember that together we can achieve this.”

In collaboration with GIZ, the project’s work in Ecuador is now being scaled with farmers’ organisations in Africa and Asia. Rather than working directly with individual women, it extends the model through organisations already connected to women in farming and food sectors. The GIZ Global Programme Farmers Organisations for the Transformation of Agricultural and Food Systems (FO-Hub) collaborates with the Eastern African Farmers Federation (EAFF), the Réseau des Organisations Paysannes et de Producteurs Agricoles de l’Afrique de l’Ouest (ROPPA), and the Asian Farmers' Association for Sustainable Rural Development (AFA). Its aim is to uptake the good experiences from Ecuador in gender inclusive public procurement for many more farmers.