Keithlin Caroo-Afrifa

organization overview

Helen’s Daughters provides training, mentorship, micro-investment, access to high-value markets, and a structured-care system for rural women farmers, who have largely been unacknowledged and undersupported. The organization uses the media and partnerships with the public and private sectors to seek opportunities for female farmers, as well as putting food security and climate resilience in the public and policy agenda. In this way, Helen’s Daughters positions rural women as key actors in driving sustainable development in the Caribbean.

Personal Bio

Keithlin Caroo-Afrifa is a food systems architect transforming how Caribbean women lead in food and farming. She is the founder and executive director of Helen’s Daughters, a St. Lucia-based non-profit that trains and empowers women in agriculture through a holistic model of technical education, market access, leadership development, and storytelling. The organization challenges gender norms, redefines rural livelihoods, and builds resilient food systems across the Caribbean.

Keithlin’s path to this work was shaped by her upbringing in a farming community and her early career in international diplomacy, where she saw firsthand how rural women were excluded from key decision-making spaces. That gap between policy and lived experience became the root of her mission: to place Caribbean women at the center of agricultural transformation.

She is a recipient of a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) honor, a Goodwill Ambassador for the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture, an Ashoka and Echoing Green Fellow, and a board director at the Equality Fund. Her work has been featured in Forbes, BBC, and National Geographic.