Rural Women’s Assembly

Guardians of land, life, seed and love

The region’s painful colonial history and exploitative power structures have been visible in RWA’s story since the beginning. In 2009, the movement held its first meeting, with 250 rural women from across the region gathering in Limpopo Province, South Africa, to overcome lingering colonial and apartheid divisions between member countries.

Its founders set three goals: to build a new regionalism connecting women across borders, to create a shared platform against crises like food poverty and land dispossession, and to confront the HIV-AIDS pandemic. From this came the movement’s defining structure: a flat, volunteer-led model governed by a Reference Group of three leaders from each of its eleven country chapters. The movement currently operates in Eswatini, Lesotho, Madagascar, Malawi, Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

Feminist agroecology and seed sovereignty

RWA practices feminist agroecology, a holistic approach linking the ecological transformation of food systems to the social relationships that sustain them. Beyond sustainable farming or increasing women’s role in value chains, its core goal is women’s autonomy: securing their access to and control over land, water, seeds and income, ensuring their voice in decision-making, and recognising their Indigenous knowledge and political agency.

It also confronts what sustains inequality in the first place — the gendered division of labour, the unpaid burden of domestic and care work, and the violence and domination that run through households, communities and institutions — toward a food system built on equity and justice at every level. It defends the agricultural commons against what it calls „neoliberal frameworks“ and the „NGOisation“ that depoliticises rural struggle.

The movement’s agroecology work grew out of a demand from its own members. After an initial focus on rights advocacy, members told RWA, „We’ve heard about our rights, but we do not eat our rights.“ In response, RWA began organising an Agroecology School for its members to learn about these holistic strategies. As a result, members have lowered production costs by replacing synthetic fertilisers with natural resources, while building climate resilience through healthier, water-retaining soils and diverse crop systems that withstand extreme weather.

In 2025, the movement further fortified members’ knowledge of their seed and land rights by translating the UN Declaration on the Rights of Peasants (UNDROP) into local languages. Over 18,000 women participated.

As “seed guardians”, RWA has established seed banks and multiplication sites propagating traditional seed for exchange and sale to members. In 2025, it conducted research documenting 45 cereals, 31 fruits, 64 legumes and 20 tubers across seven countries, with 720 participating women. The findings of this research were shared internationally through a photo-documentary exhibition, “Guardians of Land, Seed and Life”, making rural women farmers visible in their roles as seed savers, guardians of local knowledge and the backbones of local food systems.

Building a movement of “rowdy” women

Each year, RWA convenes a Feminist School, a week-long gathering built to develop a feminist consciousness and shared identity across its eleven country chapters. „We are all African eco-feminists, we are pan-Africanists, we have a common philosophy of the RWA,“ Andrews said, explaining the importance of having a common philosophy and understanding of the world they are setting out to change. „We are the guardians of land and life and seed. We fight patriarchy.“

The school is complemented by a fortnightly online course that can draw 300 to 400 women across the region at once. Andrews is among the educators, alongside external facilitators and a team built through what she calls a „training of trainers,“ so that no school depends on one voice. These gatherings have opened conversations rarely held elsewhere, from sessions on reproductive health and bodily awareness to queerness and sexuality.

RWA’s feminist education is matched by persistent, sometimes “rowdy”, action at the village level. In the South African province Limpopo, when a traditional authority refused a widow land to bury her husband, thirty RWA members loaded his coffin into a hearse, carried it into the chief’s office, and told him: „Since you don’t want this man to rest, we will bring him here to you, so that you can be as restless as he is.“ Within the hour, the land was granted.

In Namibia, after government fencing meant to keep elephants from destroying crops went unrepaired for years, members pushed a government vehicle into the elephants‘ nightly path. „We want to live in harmony with wildlife,“ Andrews recounted, „but if you are not going to help, … we are going to show you what we experience on a daily basis.“ The tactic forced an agreement to erect proper fencing. Andrews calls actions like these „weapons of the weak“: small, cumulative victories that build women’s confidence that „they can, as a collective, make gains.“