Southern Africa Rural Women's Assembly

09/06/2026

🌱 DAY 3 | WE HAVE ANSWERS: FROM DIALOGUE TO ACTION

Today marks the final day of the Rural Women's Assembly Southern Africa Consultative Dialogue, "We Have Answers: Building Resilient Food Systems."

Over the past two days, rural women from across Southern Africa have shared powerful stories of resilience, seed sovereignty, agroecology, climate adaptation, and community-led solutions. We have heard directly from the women who are feeding communities, protecting biodiversity, preserving indigenous knowledge, and building alternatives to failing food systems.

Today, we turn these experiences into collective demands and policy recommendations.

As we celebrate the International Year of the Woman Farmer, we reaffirm that rural women are not victims of climate change and food insecurity—they are leaders, innovators, seed custodians, and solution builders.

📢 Our message remains clear: We are not waiting for answers. We Have Answers.

Together, we call for: 🌾 Secure access to land and natural resources
🌱 Recognition and protection of farmer-managed seed systems
🌍 Greater investment in agroecology and climate justice
👩🏾‍🌾 Meaningful participation of rural women in decision-making
🤝 Policies that support food sovereignty and community resilience

The dialogue may be ending, but the movement continues.

08/06/2026

🌱 Learning From One Another, Growing Together

One of the most powerful moments of the RWA Consultative Dialogue has been the parallel learning sessions, where rural women from across Southern Africa have come together to teach, learn, and share practical knowledge.

From seed saving and seed multiplication, to building community seed banks, agroforestry, bio-fertilisers, pest control, and value addition, sisters are sharing skills rooted in lived experience and generations of knowledge.

These sessions remind us that some of our greatest teachers are each other. Every seed saved, every technique shared, and every lesson passed on strengthens our collective ability to build resilient food systems.

As rural women, we know that knowledge grows when it is shared. When one woman learns, an entire community benefits. When one sister teaches another, resilience spreads across borders.

🌾 Teaching one, reaching many. 🌾 Learning together, growing together. 🌾 We Have Answers.

08/06/2026

🌱 DAY 2 | WE HAVE ANSWERS: BUILDING RESILIENT FOOD SYSTEMS

Today, our voices take centre stage.

Across Southern Africa, women continue to confront the realities of climate change, food insecurity, land dispossession, water scarcity, biodiversity loss, and shrinking seed systems. Yet despite these challenges, rural women are not standing still. They are organising, saving seeds, restoring ecosystems, producing food, and building resilient communities.

Day 2 of the Rural Women's Assembly Consultative Dialogue focuses on listening to these experiences and learning from the solutions women are already implementing through agroecology, seed sovereignty, collective action, and indigenous knowledge.

As women from 11 countries share their stories, one message continues to resonate across the region:

We are not waiting for solutions. We are already creating them.

Today is about speaking truth, sharing experiences, influencing policy, and ensuring that the voices of rural women help shape the future of food systems in Africa.

🌾 Our stories matter. 🌾 Our knowledge matters. 🌾 Our solutions matter.

07/06/2026

🌱 DAY 1 | WE HAVE ANSWERS: BUILDING RESILIENT FOOD SYSTEMS

Today, rural women leaders, policymakers, researchers, and partners from across Southern Africa gather in Pretoria, South Africa, for the opening of the Rural Women’s Assembly High-Level Dialogue.

Held during the International Year of the Woman Farmer this dialogue is rooted in a simple powerful truth: rural women already have answers.

Across our region, women are protecting indigenous seeds, practising agroecology, restoring ecosystems, feeding communities, and building resilience in the face of climate change and food insecurity.

Day One focuses on sharing grassroots innovations, celebrating women as guardians of land, life, and seeds, and creating space for meaningful dialogue between communities and policymakers.

As we begin this important journey together, we reaffirm that the solutions to the food, climate, and biodiversity crises already exist within our communities.

🌾 We are not waiting for answers.
🌾 We are growing them.
🌾 We Have Answers.

25/05/2026

🌍 Africa Day: No African Is a Foreigner in Africa

As we mark Africa Day, the Rural Women’s Assembly stands in solidarity with Rural Women’s Assembly South Africa against the ongoing xenophobia that continues to divide our communities and threaten the dignity and safety of African people.

Africa Day reminds us that our struggles are shared. Poverty, unemployment, hunger, climate crisis and inequality are not caused by migrants or refugees. They are the result of unjust systems, weak leadership and economies that fail ordinary people.

As rural women, peasants and food producers, we reject hatred and violence. No African is our enemy. Our enemies are hunger, inequality, landlessness, corporate greed and the politics of division.

Today, we call for unity, dignity and justice across Africa.

No to xenophobia | Yes to African unity | Yes to justice for all.

13/05/2026

🌱 WHY THIS DIALOGUE MATTERS 🌱

Across Southern Africa, rural women continue to face the harsh realities of the climate crisis every day.Droughts, floods, rising food prices, disappearing indigenous seeds, and growing food insecurity.

But even in the midst of these challenges, rural women are already leading solutions. From saving indigenous seeds and practising agroecology to restoring soils and strengthening community resilience, women across our region are building sustainable food systems from the ground up.

Our upcoming Consultative Dialogue: “We Have Answers; Building Resilient Food Systems” is more than just a meeting. It is a space to amplify grassroots solutions, strengthen solidarity, influence policy, and affirm that the answers to the climate and food crises already exist within our communities.

📍 University of Pretoria, South Africa
📅 7–9 June 2026

12/05/2026

12/05/2026

🌾 WE HAVE ANSWERS 🌾
The Rural Women’s Assembly is proud to announce the upcoming Consultative Dialogue under the theme:
“We Have Answers: Building Resilient Food Systems”
📍 University of Pretoria, South Africa
📅 7–9 June 2026

Rural women across Southern Africa are already building solutions rooted in agroecology, seed saving, indigenous knowledge, climate resilience, and food sovereignty. This dialogue will bring together rural women leaders, policymakers, researchers, civil society, and development partners from across the SADC region to amplify these lived solutions and strengthen collective action.

The gathering will feature:
🌱 Grassroots climate resilience stories
🌱 Seed sovereignty and agroecology discussions
🌱 Regional solidarity and policy engagement
🌱 A showcase of community-led practices and innovations
🌱 The launch of our Regional Seed Observatory

For generations, rural women have fed communities, protected biodiversity, and defended land and seeds. The message is simple: the solutions already exist within our communities.

📢 Save the Date and join us as we raise the voices of rural women shaping just and resilient food systems for the future.

Interested? Register Here
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeeKiUqv0C06w9RqFWzLvu-m08sZb0iMnSeRC83lF4FV3OZeQ/viewform?usp=dialog

01/05/2026

WE FEED NATIONS. WE SUSTAIN LIFE. WE DEMAND JUSTICE.

Across Southern Africa, rural women rise before dawn, working the land, saving seeds, feeding families, and holding communities together. Yet their labour remains unseen, undervalued, and unsupported.

This Labour Day, the Rural Women’s Assembly Southern Africa honours the power, resilience, and leadership of rural women workers, farmers, seed keepers, caregivers, and community builders.

OUR LABOUR IS NOT INVISIBLE.
OUR KNOWLEDGE IS NOT SECONDARY.
OUR RIGHTS ARE NOT NEGOTIABLE.

We call for:
• Recognition of rural women as workers and rights holders
• Secure access to land with water, and seeds
• Fair and just food systems
• Protection from exploitation and climate injustice

Without rural women's labour, there is no food system. Without justice, there is no future.

17/04/2026