The Women Behind Ethiopia’s Flower Farms

9 July 2026

Every year, millions of flowers leave Ethiopia’s farms and arrive in homes across the world, with most of them grown, picked, sorted, and then packed by women. Yet for a long time women had little say in the conditions shaping their working lives. That is starting to change – and the data shows it.

Over the past eight years, WageIndicator Foundation with funding from Mondiaal FNV has worked with flower farms across Ethiopia as part of the Decent Work Check programme with an overarching goal: to drive real improvements in wages, working conditions, and the quality of dialogue between workers, trade unions, employers, and government.

The Decent Work Check programme isn't a paperwork audit of employer policies but a survey of workers themselves, asking what they experience and know about their own conditions, and it combines three mutually reinforcing elements:

• Collecting data directly from workers on the farms
• Using that data to build the capacity of trade unions to structure their demands and enter negotiations with confidence
• Then bringing all parties into structured Social Dialogue sessions where the findings are discussed and acted on. This is where the hard numbers combine with the real voices of workers.

By the end of the latest round of research that took place this year, wages had risen for both men and women across the sector – and crucially, the gender gap between them had narrowed significantly.

To understand what all this means in practice, it helps to know who is doing the work.

Walk through a flower farm in Ethiopia and most of the workers you see will be women. The single largest occupation on any farm is the horticultural grower — the workers who plant, cultivate and harvest the flowers — and over 80% of growers, as well as packers and binders, are women. They sort and prepare the flowers ready for export. They carry out the physical, repetitive, essential labour that keeps the supply chain moving. The men, who are fewer in number, are more likely to be found in technical roles.

In the latest round of our Decent Work Check (DWC) surveys, we see that workers are earning more – women's wages grew by 67% and the gap in pay between men and women is smaller than it was when we started.

The DWC measures labour compliance across many core topics, including wages and working time, employment security, family responsibilities, health and safety, social security, equal treatment, child labour and forced labour, and rights to organise. For each topic, workers are surveyed on whether their farm or factory meets the standard set by Ethiopian labour law. The results, collected across two survey rounds, give a farm-by-farm, topic-by-topic picture of where conditions stand – and where they are improving.

Social Dialogue: Combining Data With Worker Voices

The social dialogue sessions aren’t just ordinary meetings. Concerns raised by workers are not just anecdotes – they’re backed by evidence that all parties have agreed to engage with. Trade unions enter negotiations knowing what the data shows and employers see clearly where their practices fall short. And government officials gain direct insight into conditions they rarely encounter up close. The DWC data results don’t just inform the conversation, they also provide workers and unions with a stronger foundation from which to negotiate.

Some of the most important conversations happened in a different kind of setting entirely where WageIndicator held five women-only sessions across four farms as well as one leather factory that was part of the wider project, with 137 women participating. What emerged from those sessions had not surfaced anywhere else.

Women spoke openly about maternity protections, representation in workplace committees, and the pressures of balancing work with family responsibilities. One finding reshaped the understanding of the data entirely: women were not leaving after maternity leave because they were being dismissed, which some survey data might suggest, they were leaving because they had no one to care for their child – a completely different problem – and one that requires a completely different solution.

The sessions also revealed something harder to quantify but just as significant: a shift in women's agency. Those who arrived focused on their day-to-day needs left talking about long-term influence – about wanting a say in the decisions that shape their futures. At one farm, women organised a support fund, with workers regularly contributing 50 to 100 Ethiopian birr to support colleagues through childbirth, illness, or marriage. At another farm, participants went further, establishing a formal women’s group to ensure their voices reach management directly.

Towards better work conditions

Health and Safety, Social Security, and workers’ Rights to Organise saw the strongest gains – all areas that were directly discussed and challenged in Social Dialogue sessions.

On Health and Safety, the improvement was the most comprehensive of any topic in the survey. Farms that were missing protective equipment for their workers began providing it directly following dialogue sessions.

For Social Security, workers are now better covered for work injury, invalidity, and dependents' benefits – an improvement linked to both trade union advocacy and Social Dialogue sessions that focused on medical insurance and workers' compensation. Awareness was a key part of this: many workers simply did not know what they were entitled to before the sessions.

On Rights to Organise, the shift was perhaps the most remarkable. The right to strike – acknowledged by fewer than one in four workers in the first round of surveys – was confirmed by more than half by round two. Collective bargaining coverage also rose. This change is directly linked to the awareness generated through Social Dialogue and the DWC survey process. Workers who did not know they had these rights now do – and that knowledge doesn’t go away.

Overall, compliance with Ethiopia’s labour law improved by 8% for women and 7% for men between rounds.

Progress on Wages — and the Distance Still to Go

The narrowing of the gender pay gap is one of the programme's most visible achievements. When the programme began, men were earning 67% more than women across the sector. By the end, that gap had fallen to 27%, nearly halving in the space of two survey rounds. Women's median wages grew by 67% over the period, more than double the rate of men's wage growth at 27%, meaning women were genuinely catching up.

However, there is still a long way to go. Even with these gains, WageIndicator's own Cost of Living data shows that wages across most roles remain well below what it actually costs to live.

WageIndicator's living wage estimate is built on prices it collects directly – food, housing, transport, childcare and many other essentials. When mapped against actual take-home pay, the gap becomes clear: women's median wage covers only 14.4% of what a typical family needs to live on, while men's median wage cover 18.3%.

Flower sector wages are at times seen as competitive compared to other industries in Ethiopia, but competitive isn't the same as enough. A wage that looks reasonable on paper can still leave a worker unable to cover the basics depending on where they live and what their family needs.

What Comes Next

The progress of the DWC programme is real – the gender pay gap has nearly halved, compliance has improved, and women have platforms they did not have before. But the work continues. Wage structures need to shift toward targeted adjustments that close the gap rather than preserve it – a uniform percentage increase sounds fair, but when men already earn more, it widens the distance in real terms every time. Childcare must also be treated as a workforce issue, not a personal one.

Importantly, the living wage must remain the benchmark – a wage that covers the real cost of living.