On a quiet morning at the close-out meeting of Fairtrade Africa’s DONUTS programme, something unusual happened. Farmworkers spoke. Not cautiously, not through intermediaries, but in their own words. Some were emotional. Others were assertive. All were listened to.
That moment captured the essence of Dignified Opportunities Nurtured through Trade and Sustainability (DONUTS) wine: a programme built on the radical idea that dignity, dialogue and decent work cannot be delivered to workers without being built with them.
From 2022 to 2025, DONUTS worked across Africa’s agricultural value chains, with a strong focus on the wine sector, to confront some of farming’s most entrenched challenges: low wages, unsafe working conditions, weak labour relations and the quiet normalisation of human rights abuses.
It did so not by adding another layer of compliance, but by creating spaces where workers, employers, unions and the state could sit in the same room and talk.
The realities that led to DONUTS
“The workers were the direct beneficiaries of this project,” says Emerentia Patientia, the senior project officer for this project at Fairtrade Africa, who played a central role in driving the DONUTS wine project. “It’s easy for us as implementers to say the programme made an impact. But the real validation comes from hearing it from the workers themselves.”
At the close-out meeting, that validation was impossible to ignore. Patientia recalls how workers’ testimonies carried an emotional weight that no monitoring report could replicate. Their stories, she explains, gave the programme legitimacy because they came “from their own mouths, from their real experiences”.
That emphasis on voice was deliberate. For years, labour regulation in agriculture has existed largely on paper. Laws promised democratised workplaces, but farms remained places where power flowed in one direction. DONUTS wine was born out of the recognition that compliance without conversation changes very little.
A shift on the farm
From the perspective of farm management, DONUTS wine marked a turning point. Athenkosi Gosani, a manager at Koopmanskloof Winery in Stellenbosch, describes the programme as moving relationships “beyond certification”.
“Yes, there are standards we must comply with,” she says, “but DONUTS wine opened people’s eyes to the importance of relationship-building and capacity-building.”
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