The Rural Women’s Assembly (RWA) is a self-organised network of rural women movements, assemblies, and organisations in different countries in the Southern African Development Community (SADC) region. RWA came out of a gathering in Limpopo, South Africa, in 2009 organized by the Land Access Movement of South Africa (LAMOSA), the Women on Farms Project (WfP) and the Trust for Community Outreach and Education (TCOE). During the gathering, over 250 women from various Southern African nations convened, representing peasant producers, small-scale farmers, and activists working on land rights, food sovereignty, and reproductive rights. Women shared their struggles, experiences, and desires for unity amongst the various movements and organizations represented.  The gathering was a catalyst for a unified feminist grassroots movement of rural women and was the beginning of a collective that would create the RWA, the RWA charter and platform for action. Since its inception, chapters have grown in countries around Southern Africa, including Lesotho Madagascar, Malawi, Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, Swaziland, Tanzania, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.  

The initial slogan of RWA was “We are the Guardians of Land, Life, and Love,” and was later revised to “We are the Guardians of Land, Life, Seeds and Love.” The slogan encompasses the work and desire of RWA to level up consciousness, create solidarity and practice reciprocity. RWA is, in part, trying to articulate the relationship between people and nature, to promote love of the land, to understand seeds as life and women as seeds, and to encourage love in order to challenge violence at all levels, including gender-based violence and the violence of land grab, corporate control of food systems, hunger, disenfranchisement and capitalist greed. The system guiding the work is feminist agroecology, which means RWA takes into account not only how to care for the land but also understanding and challenging the social division of labour as well as land-holding patterns that disenfranchise women. 

The RWA organises for food sovereignty, seed sovereignty, land rights and climate justice (and against corporate control of land and food systems) through teach-ins, workshops, research and documentation, and policy advocacy. RWA promotes seed saving, seed sharing and seed banks, small-scale farming, natural compost and the reintroduction of indigenous and nutritious foods. They advocate for securing the rights of rural women and girls, ensuring their access to and ownership of land. They engage in national, regional and global advocacy campaigns and have adopted the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Peasants (UNDROP) as an advocacy and legal framework that can put authorities to task and create assessment criteria. RWA also engages in urgent action, providing resources and comfort for sisters in need through a program that they call “Neighbors Must Go.” They have open lines of communication between their members so that when a cyclone hits Malawi, for instance, women in the network convene and assess after hearing what is needed to help their sisters and raise money. Those closest in distance and able to move, go to the region hit, many times by road, and provide resources to their sisters in need. 

RWA envisions and is creating a world very different from the designs of multinational food and pharmaceutical companies, far from the constrained, deficit-focused, competition-driven ideals of the global capitalist model. RWA envisions a world aligned to feminist agroecology, biodiversity, food and seed sovereignty; a world where small-scale farming is the way, where women have access and ownership of land, where the food is good, and the soil is healthy; a world free from violence against the land, the seed, and women. They work with abundance in mind and abide by the law of reciprocity. They learn from nature and mimic its ways. RWA envisions this world, and in their work, they make it anew. 

Read more on our last blog post by the CMI! At CSW68:  Exploring feminist economic realities, their challenges and possibilities here