Frazer Potani, AfricaNews reporter in Lilongwe, Malawi
Just looking at her one clearly appreciates that she is old and frail therefore in need of support for food, clothing and shelter to live comfortably in her last days. However, each passing day this 60-year-old woman Florence Mkandawire from Gowoyani Village, Chief Chikulamayembe's Area (Rumphi), over 80 Km from the country's third largest city, Mzuzu in the north struggles just to have one meal for her and other over a dozen mouths.
“Life is really very tough for me because I look after 16 orphans. Their parents died. I keep them and they all look up to me for all their needs. I get food for my family from farming and sometimes we sell part of the harvest to buy items like soap,” said Mkandawire a widow her husband having died 14 years ago.
“I face a lot of challenges because the orphans require food, clothes and to go to school but I can’t afford all those. I am unable to produce enough food or to look after them,” she said disclosing that she relies on a one and half acre land inherited from her late grandmother to produce food.
“The land is just too small and accessing farm inputs such as fertilizer and hybrid seed to produce food in the field is difficult hence I don’t produce just enough food for all us,” she said while wiping sweat from her forehead with a corner of her Chitenje (cloth) as she stood in her garden.
The old woman added that in an effort to access more land for more food production for her family she has to rent a piece of land from other people in her village.
“If I had money I would buy another piece of land for food production,” explained Mkandawire.
She further said that producing food in the field is even a huge mountain to climb for her because she is weak due to old age and uses a hoe and machete for cutting small trees.
Florence is not alone because 47-year-old Sofina Samison from Diyoni Village Traditional Authority (T/A) Msakambewa in Dowa about 40 Km from Lilongwe in the centre is a widow with four children but owns just a small piece of land for food production.
“My plot is two acres and I had problems to get this plot. The problem was that I lost my husband in 1996 because of HIV and AIDS and his relatives wanted to grab the land from me,” she said adding that she had to then join a women’s group through Action Aid-Malawi to access land.
“It was through the group that I was given two acres of the land where I am cultivating. But sometimes I fail to look after the crops well because of sickness since I am also HIV positive. I can’t depend on my children because they have to go to school. But God takes care of us and life goes on. I even thank the Creator because using some proceeds from my farming I have been able to build a new house with burnt bricks and I am about to finish it,” said Samison adding that the land is the main source of her survival with her dependents.
“We are six in my family; my mother and my four children. When I have good harvest I sell part of it and keep food for six people,” explained Samison adding that she uses hoes to grow crops.
“But the land doesn’t produce enough food for us especially when we don’t receive good rains. Sometimes I apply fertilizer on the maize crop while groundnuts don’t require fertilizer,” she said.
In Malawi, four out of every five people live in rural areas, where women provide most of the agricultural labour and the food –seven out of 10 agricultural workers are women.
But the number of women with full access to the means of production – land and seeds – is almost insignificant.
Mkandawire and Samison are just some of the many women in Malawi struggling to rinse hunger and poverty stains.
Just four in every 100 Malawian women own the land they work on. And even though women in the country are by tradition the producers of crops, they are the most vulnerable to hunger: portions are served to men and children first, women eat last.
Malawian women are even treated as less than equal and their high illiteracy levels tend to perpetuate gender inequality.
No wonder in Action Aid Malawi Report for 2009 National Board Chairman Alick Msowoya and former Country Director Boniface Msiska said their organization deliberately targets women and girls in their programmes.
“We work with women and girls because they are regarded as second class citizens who bear the brunt of the violence that is ingrained in their culture,” they said.
In fact on agricultural production even Action Aid-International says women in poor developing countries worldwide have always been active in producing food crops, processing and marketing it however, they continue to suffer from pains of hunger and poverty because a research reveals that they are not recognized as farmers by their own families, or communities including by governments as well as donors!
The organization adds that patriarchy, stereotypes about men and women’s rights and roles, traditional values and cultures, as well as the current global economic model all come together to generate and reinforce why women are not recognized as equal human beings in society, never mind as farmers.
This is compounded by actual policies, legislation and practices on the ground. The net results of all this are that the needs of women farmers are ignored when it comes to policy, legislation, extension services, research, or other government support.
“Women are desperately short of secure and adequate land, basic tools and inputs, credit, extension services and technical advice, relevant research, and appropriate infrastructure and technology. In short, women farmers have not received the support they need in order to thrive,” says the organization.
Appreciating that women need land if Malawi has to eradicate hunger and poverty, the Coalition of Women Farmers (COWFA) and Action Aid Malawi’s Women’s Rights to Land (WOLAR) Project intensified a public awareness campaign on women’s land rights.
The matter resulted into more women gaining confidence to question irregularities in the land law review process and demand access to it before it was to be tabled in Parliament.
According to Action Aid Malawi Report for 2009 in 2008 some 35 women won cases in court and got back their property including land which was grabbed from them.
In addition 88 women demanded and were given land of their own.
COWFA’s leader for northern Malawi Mazoe Gondwe said if hunger and poverty are to be eradicated and the country achieve Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) on hunger and poverty eradication women should be empowered with resources including land in agricultural production.
“If you are to fight poverty, you have to empower the woman because "the woman is the think tank of the family," she said adding, “If the land becomes her property, the harvests will be better.”
Gondwe who has represented fellow women on various international scenes advocating for women rights explained that women in Malawi are in dire need of land, emphasizing that land is power, wealth, and everything as far as the women farmers in are concerned in Malawi.
“Our government has been working on a Lands Bill to be brought before Parliament so as to salvage women from their long deprivation of land in the country,” she said describing lack of access to land by women as injustice.
Meanwhile, to sample difficulties faced by poor Malawian women farmers a group of four women farmers from the Netherlands with support from Action Aid Netherlands visited Dowa and Rumphi and interacted with them including Mkandawire and Samson recently.
In a statement Leader of Delegation Nathalie Ankersmit said the visit was in consideration of the great global growing concern on lack of progress to achieve MGDs especially number 1 targeting at eradicating extreme poverty and hunger through cutting by half by 2015 the proportion of people affected by the two problems on the planet.
She disclosed that Action Aid Netherlands is one of the six European partners implementing ‘We Won't Accept Hunger Project’ with funding from European Union (EU).
“The central objective of this campaign is to heighten public awareness and pressure in Europe to propel European citizens and European decision makers to act on one of the most off-track targets, MDG 1,” said Ankersmit.
In particular, the project aims at raising public awareness around the important role of African small scale women farmers play in fighting against hunger and poverty in Sub Saharan Africa.
“The project also aims at building a longer term vision for food rights; detrimental impact of national and EU policies on for example energy, trade and agriculture on food security in developing countries and need for greater EU policy coherence in order to build solidarity among EU citizens to support smallholder women farmers to halve hunger by 2015,” explained Ankersmit.
COWFA National Coordinator Ellen Matupi said the visitors had learnt a lot from Malawian women farmers and vice versa.
“They have seen the gaps existing between them and us and that, women in this country are also not fully empowered. They said they have some challenges too. But they are better off than us because we are still abused by men. The Dutch women are farmers and we are also farmers. The only difference is our complexion and that our colleagues are more advanced since they are commercial farmers as they use machinery which we don’t have,” she said.
Malawi's Gender, Child and Community Development Minister Reen Kachere said women in Malawi (making over half of the over 13 million population) contribute a lot in the fight against hunger and poverty at household and national level through agricultural production and informal trading in rural and urban areas through selling their produce in markets.
However, she was quick to say that women are fighting the two problems in the country amid a lot of challenges.
“These include lack of access to credit, markets for their produce, land and farm equipment to produce food in the field,” said Kachere adding that women were also struggling to access information on their rights, to know, claim and defend themselves.
But the United Kingdom’s Department for International Development (DfID) research paper ‘The turning point on poverty: background paper on gender’ says total agricultural outputs in Africa could increase by up to 20 percent if women’s access to agricultural inputs was equal to men’s.
While the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) discloses that across the developing world (including Malawi), women account for 60 to 80 per cent of farmers yet the majority of over 925 million people going hungry daily worldwide are women and girls!
It however, reveals that if the gender gap in agricultural inputs between men and women is closed 100 to 150 million people could be bailed out of hunger worldwide.
“More equitable access to land, fertilizers, water for irrigation, seeds, technology, tools, livestock and extension services would make agriculture a more efficient means of promoting shared economic growth, reducing poverty and improving food security and rural livelihoods,” says the organization.
Just looking at her one clearly appreciates that she is old and frail therefore in need of support for food, clothing and shelter to live comfortably in her last days. However, each passing day this 60-year-old woman Florence Mkandawire from Gowoyani Village, Chief Chikulamayembe's Area (Rumphi), over 80 Km from the country's third largest city, Mzuzu in the north struggles just to have one meal for her and other over a dozen mouths.
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