- The Rural Women’s Assembly, which claims a membership of 170,000 women across Southern Africa, promotes agroecology as a strategy for its members’ autonomy and resilience.
- One obstacle to the association’s members choosing this agricultural pathway is that relatively few women own the land they cultivate, limiting their decision-making power.
- Rural development specialist Richard Mkandawire says enabling women who work the land to control it is key to resolving food security issues.
CHIRADZULU, Malawi — In Chiradzulu district in southern Malawi, 60 women who are members of the Rural Women’s Assembly grow fruits and vegetables alongside their staple crop, maize. In recent years, there’s been growing demand for their organically produced crops from buyers in the nearby city of Blantyre, Malawi’s commercial capital.
The assembly’s chair in Chiradzulu, Diana Sitima, runs a 3.5-hectare (8.6-acre) organic farm here. She says when she started the farm in 1993, she used to take the produce to consumers in Blantyre.
“Now they are coming to us. They say our produce has a good taste,” Sitima says.
According to the women, the biggest obstacles they face as farmers is that they lack land titles and capital to invest in their farming. As members of the RWA, these are the issues they discuss at their meetings and bring to their local council and central government for solutions.
In 1998, not long after she got married, RWA member Lonely Kholowa’s parents gave her a piece of land to cultivate. But after her father passed away in 2009 — her mother had died seven years earlier — her father’s older brother grabbed the land, arguing that according to their culture, she belonged to the family of her mother who came from Machinga district in the east of the country.
Today, Kholowa farms land in her husband’s village elsewhere in Chiradzulu. “I don’t have land of my own. The land we have belongs to my husband and his relatives. If something happens to him, I have nothing,” she says.
“I have always wanted to save money to buy my own piece of land, but it’s difficult.”
Sitima and her husband had other income that allowed them to save and borrow money to buy their piece of land. She understands the importance — and the difficulty — of securing ownership of farmland.
“I own my land so I am stable. I started farming as a business way back, borrowing money from institutions. I have dealt with some of the challenges. But not many women farmers in the district have the advantages that I have; so we discuss how to deal with these challenges,” Sitima says.
Defending women’s land rights
The regional assembly to which Sitima and the other Chiradzulu women belong was born in 2009, when 250 women from nine Southern African countries — including small-scale farmers, land rights activists and labor unionists — met in South Africa to discuss their struggles.
The three-day gathering, organized by the Land Access Movement of South Africa, Women on Farms Project and Trust for Community Outreach and Education, led to the formation of a membership-based network with the aim of championing sustainable food systems, food sovereignty and climate justice, and amplifying women farmers’ voices on issues of access to land.
Today, the RWA claims a membership of nearly 170,000 women in 11 countries. “I think we’re probably the biggest rural movement of women across Southern Africa,” says Mercia Andrews, an activist, founding member of the network, and its current regional convenor.
The RWA’s members take the position that women’s right to own land is inseparable from their rights to food and water. In a phone interview, Andrews tells Mongabay that across Southern Africa, women’s access to land should be protected by law.
“Yet, the reality is different. The reality is that traditional authorities and families make local rules and keep women off land,” she says.
“So we challenge those kinds of patriarchal conditions and we get women to engage robustly with the traditional authority. We want to look at how we can also take legal action now,” she says.
Andrews says overcoming obstacles to women owning land are a main focus of the women’s assembly. “We have part-control over systems of production, but if you don’t own the land, then you’re only partially controlled, because then the income, what you plant, how you plant, is often dependent on what the husband says.”
This feminist movement of rural women also promotes agroecology, which Andrews explains allows the assembly’s members to eschew synthetic farm inputs and turn instead to farmer-saved seeds and environmentally friendly methods.
“As opposed to buying pesticides and fertilizers and GMO seeds as inputs, we also begin to look at how we can use natural pesticides, fertilizer, etc. to repel insects,” she says.
She adds RWA members emphasize restoring and building resilience on their farms, through building terraces and water troughs, agroforestry, and other methods to restore degraded soils and build a resilient agricultural system.
In Chiradzulu, the women learn about these methods at Sitima’s farm, where nitrogen-fixing trees such as gliricidia and horticultural crops grow together. The farm no longer uses synthetic fertilizers, whose prices have risen steadily year on year in Malawi, relying instead on manure from the farm’s livestock.
Andrews says the RWA promotes farming methods that are in harmony with nature and protect soils from degradation. She says the growing market for organically produced foods allows the assembly’s women farmers to charge a premium for the product of their agroecological farming.
Practical lessons
The Rural Women’s Assembly launched its Malawi chapter in 2016. Today, it has more than 2,000 members, according to national coordinator Alice Kachere.
Notwithstanding the success of people like Sitima, agroecology is still not widely practiced by women or other farmers in Malawi. Sitima says the connections she made through the assembly allowed her to learn from the experiences of women farmers from elsewhere in the region.
“Their ideas helped us start planting bananas around the fish ponds to preserve water, and introduce plantains to capitalize on growing demand,” she says.
It has taken 20 years for Sitima to develop her agroecological farm into a profitable enterprise, one that’s able to attract customers to buy things like sweet potatoes and pigeon peas, vegetables and avocados, and eggs and chickens from her throughout the year.
It acts as a training center not only for women farmers in the village, but for students from colleges from across the country.
Movements like the RWA help women act together to overcome shared challenges and create opportunities for more productive farming, according to Lesley Hope, an agricultural economist at the University of Energy and Natural Resources in Ghana, who has conducted research into women farmers and agroecology in sub-Saharan Africa.
But despite the decades-old campaign for women’s rights to land, access remains deeply linked to patrilineal inheritance systems in most societies, giving men the control while limiting women’s productivity, Hope tells Mongabay in an email.
“Control of resources by African women is largely socio-cultural and linked to system of inheritance. The patrilineal system of inheritance gives the control of resources to men and thus men determine the extent to which females can use the resources,” she says.
This illustrates how culture powerfully determines women’s access and control over resources, she says.
Over the decades, Hope says, NGOs, governments and financial institutions have supported women farmers with financing and training in adoption of farming technologies such as agroecology. But while these actions have empowered women, there’s need for more work on land reforms across sub-Saharan Africa to give more women access and control, she says: “This is quite difficult given the cultural underpinnings of land ownership, hence the need involve traditional leaders to make this possible.”
Richard Mkandawire, a rural development expert and former senior adviser at the African Union’s New Partnership for Africa’s Development, points out women provide much of the farming labor in Africa, so ensuring their ownership and control of land could strengthen food security and agriculture-based economies on the continent.
“Because they work the land more, they understand it better than men do. Therefore, if we want to resolve the food insecurity issues on the continent, we need to have women have control of land being the primary means of production,” Mkandawire says.
He says movements such as the RWA are important for women to have a collective voice on challenges that affect their productivity as farmers.
In Chiradzulu, Sitima says she believes owning land was the most important step toward her success, and wishes more women farmers in the district had land titles.
“We’re now a fully integrated farm. I think we have achieved this because of stability. When you are renting land or expect someone to push you out anytime, you can’t implement your ideas,” she says.
Banner image: A woman holds up land tenure certificates in Chipata, Zambia (2017). Image by USAID via Flickr (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
In Malawi, one woman’s farm shows what’s possible with land and support
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