“For organising rural women across Southern Africa into a united force defending land, seed and bodily autonomy against corporate and patriarchal dispossession.”
The Rural Women’s Assembly (RWA) is a self-organised, transnational movement of over 178,000 small-scale farmers across eleven Southern African nations, united to defend land, seed and bodily autonomy against corporate agribusiness and patriarchal dispossession. Rejecting the traditional NGO model in favour of a flat, volunteer-led structure, it has built one of the region’s largest autonomous platforms for rural women, recognised as “Guardians of Land, Life, Seed and Love.”
Through feminist agroecology and food and seed sovereignty, RWA challenges corporate control over the region’s food systems while strengthening communities’ resilience to climate shocks. It has established 24 seed multiplication sites and documented hundreds of Indigenous seed varieties, defending traditional seed systems from commercialisation.
Through healing circles and cross-border mutual aid, RWA has turned women long excluded from land ownership into a united, persistent political voice — one that, in the words of its Regional Coordinator, Mercia Andrews, is more “rowdy” than “radical”. That voice helped secure a 2016 Zambian law mandating equal land allocation to women and Eswatini’s landmark 2018 Sexual Offences and Domestic Violence Bill.