Rural Women’s Assembly South Africa Land Conference
Boschendal, Franshoek
23-25 May 2021
“Rural women are the guardians of seed, life and love. Without land, seeds cannot be planted. Without land, life cannot be brought forth and without land in the hands of women, the love for nature does not exist while corporate control rapidly destroys the planet we share.”
Aims:
- Revive RWAs One Woman One Hectare campaign within RWA SA through sharing and strategising
- Gain government feedback/accountability on One Hectare One Household
- Develop a clear strategy for the development of a land policy from the ground up.
Background
The Rural Women’s Assembly is a regional membership-based movement, with a membership exceeding 100 000 black rural women in the Southern Africa region. The member countries include South Africa, Namibia, Lesotho, Eswatini, Mauritius, Malawi, Madagascar, Mozambique, Zambia and Zimbabwe. The South African Chapter of the Rural Women’s Assembly has been advancing a campaign ‘One Woman, One Hectare’ for the last six years, and was championed by our former board member Dr Wallace Mgoqi in his capacity as the Commissioner of the Gender Commission for the Western- and the Northern Cape and as Acting Judge in the Land Claims Court.
In 2015 the Rural Women’s Assembly (RWA) launched the One Woman One Hectare Campaign, with the demand “We want land for food!”.
The Event:
Rural women from across the country will be meeting to engage the UNDROP as a tool to develop a land policy that is inclusive. Further to this, the RWA look to develop a strategy to action the One-Woman-One-Hectare campaign, to engage stakeholders from national, provincial and local government as well as civil society partners to strengthen the campaign.
RWA insists that the rural women’s voices on this issue be heard, by having the rural women from across the country speaking at the event about their specific land issues. We aim to bring the focus back to the critical role of women in our communities and the need to address women’s demands to land, to live on, to eat from and to sustain with. The outcome of the conference is to draft a land policy that is written by rural women with a strategy of getting it into the national land narrative.
Join the Rural Women\’s Assembly of South Africa through live tweets and Live Facebook videos on 23-25th May 2021 when we take on the Land Question in South Africa and Re-Imagine a Land Policy written from the Ground Up.
