While this female-led workforce is essential to the quality of the final tea product, they receive the smallest share of the value created in the supply chain.
Addressing this imbalance is not simply a matter of ethical sourcing, it’s a question of gender equity. For businesses aiming to support women’s empowerment globally, closing the living wage gap in supply chains is crucial.
Why the Living Wage gap matters
In many tea-growing regions, tea plucking is one of the few sources of formal employment for rural women. Despite this, wages often fall short of covering basic living costs.
The Living Wage gap - the difference between what workers earn and what is needed for essentials such as food, housing, healthcare, and education - remains significant. For women, the consequences extend beyond income.
When wages are below a living standard, women have less financial independence and limited influence over household decisions. Even when women are primary earners, a lack of control over finances and without access to independent bank accounts, their ability to save, plan for the future, or invest in their children’s wellbeing is restricted.
Closing the wage gap strengthens women’s economic autonomy, and evidence shows that when women control income, households see improvements in nutrition, health, and education.
Redirecting value back to workers
A central challenge in the tea industry is ensuring that more value from global supply chains reaches the workers. Traditionally, economic value accrues downstream, through processing, branding, and retail, while tea pickers receive a small portion.
At Ahmad Tea, we are addressing this through the ‘Hand Picked Profit Shared’ initiative, which redistributes a portion of company profits directly to tea pickers. In 2025, 12,242 workers received bonuses, the majority of them women. The principle is simple: if workers play a critical role in creating value, they should receive a fair share of it.
Digital payments and financial autonomy
A key feature of the programme is that bonuses are delivered digitally to workers’ own bank accounts, improving transparency and supporting financial inclusion in regions where often cash payments have been the norm.
Direct payments allow workers to see what they receive and ensure funds reach them without intermediaries. Suppliers must provide evidence of payment, and tea gardens can be removed from the programme if standards are not met.
For women, having individual bank accounts is particularly significant. In some communities, women are primary earners but may not control household finances. An individual account gives women greater autonomy over their earnings.
Early feedback shows that some women have been able to save for the first time. While the programme is still developing, financial inclusion is an important step toward economic independence.
That money helped us a great deal. Some of our children are still studying, and we need to pay tuition and transport. My wish for the future is only that my son can get a good job.
Julie Konda, tea picker, Jamirah Tea Estate, Assam, India
Contributing to closing the wage gap
The bonus is based on our sourcing standard - the Green Standard. Our key suppliers are those who provide premium quality tea leaves, demonstrate progress on social standards and human rights, and show positive ecosystem management of their environment.
These criteria ensure that the bonuses recognise and reward sustainable and responsible practices across our supply chain. Based on this framework, we review the tea suppliers who provided the largest volumes of tea in the previous year, and these are the suppliers who qualify for the Hand Picked Profit Shared bonus.
Different contexts, different solutions
One-size-fits-all solutions rarely work in global supply chains. Infrastructure, labour structures, and payment systems differ across tea-producing countries. In India and Kenya, digital payments enable direct transfers, but in Sri Lanka, cash payments remain common, and digital banking is limited.
To address this, Ahmad Tea partnered with IDH, The Sustainable Trade Initiative, and BPL Plantations to measure and reduce wage gaps using an evidence-based approach, achieving a reduction of roughly 75% for workers linked to sourced volumes.
A moment for industry action
Looking ahead, meaningful industry-wide change will require more than isolated initiatives. It will take the widespread adoption of living-wage benchmarks, responsible pricing practices, and digital payment systems that ensure workers receive income directly and transparently.
Through Hand Picked Profit Shared, we are sending a clear signal to our tea suppliers that we are committed to investing in empowering the women in our supply chain and the long-term sustainability of tea-growing communities.
For Ahmad Tea, this is about reshaping how value flows through the tea industry. The people who harvest tea should share more meaningfully in the prosperity their work creates.
By helping close the Living Wage gap and directing more income back to tea pickers, most of whom are women, we aim to support greater financial independence, security and opportunity.
Because a truly sustainable future for tea depends not only on the leaves we source, but on ensuring the people who harvest them share fairly in the value of every cup.
About the author
Zahra Afshar is a lawyer turned sustainability leader who has dedicated her career to advancing justice – first in the courtroom and now across global supply chains. Trained in criminal defence and human rights law, she specialised in prison law and miscarriages of justice before moving in-house to Ahmad Tea, a family-owned business exporting to over 90 countries.
As head of legal, human rights and sustainability, Afshar now applies her analytical rigour and principled outlook to one of the world’s most complex and historic supply chains - tea.
She was named as one of 12 influential women in food and drink in Food Manufacture this year.
