Women-run community kitchens

Lack of women's social leadership. In low-income neighbourhoods women carry the daily work of feeding families but are rarely in the rooms where decisions are made. Cooking together lowers food costs and, through rotating roles, budgeting and negotiating with authorities, turns that hidden labour into organised, visible leadership.

Thrives in dense urban or peri-urban neighbourhoods during economic crises, lockdowns or long-term hunger, where neighbours already know each other and women have a tradition of mutual help. It needs a borrowed space, pots, fuel and water, a steady flow of food (members' contributions, donations, public programmes) and, over time, a federation or coordinating body that can bargain with the state without being captured by it.

Cooking at scale is cheaper than cooking alone, and a shared pot makes a shared space. Rotating jobs (buying, cooking, accounts, dealing with officials) give many women practice in leadership, and a visible service the whole neighbourhood depends on gives them standing to speak.

Kudumbashree (Kerala State Poverty Eradication Mission, India); Mesa de Concertación para la Lucha contra la Pobreza (Peru); Grupo de Análisis para el Desarrollo, GRADE (Peru, researchers on ollas comunes); Coordinadora Popular y Solidaria (Uruguay, coordinating body for ollas populares); Rimisp, Latin American Center for Rural Development (Chile, researchers on ollas in Uruguay).

Capture by political parties or the state in exchange for food; relying on one subsidy or donor that can vanish; burnout and the double shift for women, which can reinforce rather than loosen gender roles; leadership staying with a few women while others remain 'consumers'; poor water and sanitation; food that is filling but not nourishing when donations are mostly starch; conflict with authorities over registers and data.

Rooted in Latin American popular movements: ollas comunes in Chile from the 1930s and especially under the 1980s dictatorship, comedores populares in Lima from 1978 (federated through a national commission of self-managed kitchens from 1986), ollas populares in Uruguay during the 2002 and 2020 crises, and a large revival across the region during COVID-19. Similar women's group kitchens run in Kerala through Kudumbashree. Practices are shared openly between neighbourhoods; the main protocol in the literature is to keep kitchens self-governed and to let women decide how, and whether, to accept outside support.