Context
African societies are mainly patriarchal with social norms and gender roles that discourage women’s ownership of property. Women’s access to and control over land remains very low in most African societies. They often only have access through their husbands and lose access on the death of their husbands or they have to borrow, rent or join cooperatives to have access. In some cases, they only have access to land with poor soil quality. The small holder women famers are also not often beneficiaries of governments’ programs as they remain the bulk of the illiterate population in most countries.
Objective
transformAfrica seeks to bring together a group of dedicated civil society actors from different African countries working on Agroecology. The working group aims to a) document the impact of climate change on the livelihoods of rural women farmers, b) understand the ways their gender intersects with and is impacted by other social factors such as gender roles, expectations and other social norms and practices held in their localities (intersectional factors), and c) promote best practices of Agroecology for climate change adaptation in the respective communities and societies.
Activities
The Heinrich Böll Foundation in collaboration with the working group is producing four short documentaries on impacts of climate change and gender norms on rural women farmers and their successful transformative agro-ecological strategies in Morocco, Tunisia, Senegal und Nigeria. The documentaries will be accompanied by a short paper on the same subject. These advocacy materials will be used on both new and traditional media to influence decision-makers within and outside the continent in order to provide support to scale up the adoption of agro-ecological practices and support women small holder farmers in the respective countries.