Building Power, Voice and Justice for Rural Women
The Rural Women’s Assembly (RWA) is a movement of rural women across Southern Africa working collectively to advance land with water rights, food sovereignty, climate justice, and women’s leadership.
Highlights
RWA Mauritius: The Maize Fields of Rodrigues: Seeds of Food Sovereignty
RWA South Africa: Rural women strengthen their voices for Land, Food, Climate Justice and Safety
RWA Zimbabwe: From Grassroots to the National Stage: How Indigenous Seeds, Traditional Knowledge and Rural Women’s Resilience Are Transforming Livelihoods, the Story of Dorcas Munyanyi, RWA Member, Makoni, Rusape, Zimbabwe
RWA Tanzania: Promoting sustainable agricultural practices and agro ecological practices through Traditional Food Day
RWA Lesotho: When Women Produce, Families Grow
Emergencies, Countless Lives: What 2026 Looks Like for Rural Women
Across Southern Africa, rural women are navigating a landscape of continuous, overlapping, and mutually reinforcing crises that profoundly shape everyday survival, livelihoods, and dignity. These crises are not temporary disruptions nor isolated events; they represent entrenched structural realities rooted in unequal political systems, fragile economies, ecological instability, and deeply embedded social inequalities. For rural women, crisis is experienced as a permanent condition. Drought is followed by floods. Economic hardship is intensified by rising prices. Land pressures collide with climate pressures. Debt burdens shrink public services precisely when communities need them most. The result is a cycle of vulnerability that repeats with increasing intensity. What distinguishes these crises is not only their severity but their interconnected nature. Against this backdrop, the Rural Women’s Assembly identifies a set of urgent and structural crises that demand sustained organising, collective resistance, policy advocacy, and the construction of feminist alternatives
