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.
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
