I arrive on the back of a ute to Polly’s place where we’re welcomed by around twenty women farmers singing and dancing.
Africa is completely overwhelming – in the best kind of way.
Polly lives in Katakwi, eastern Uganda in a small cluster of close-knit villages and stretches of farmland. Katakwi is around eight hours drive from Kampala with NO stopping. On the horizon of her fields of groundnuts (peanuts), cassava and maize are the mountains that border Kenya.
I’ve travelled to the other side of the world with ActionAid to visit Polly and her small-hold farm to develop a better understanding of her world and specifically her role in increasing food security for her family and community.
Who is Polly? Polly is one of the most welcoming and warm people I’ve come across. She has a big smile, sparkly eyes, is tall and is always immaculately dressed, putting us shabby, dusty ‘westerners’ to shame.
She is something of a matriarch in her family and community. Her husband is long gone with another women and she has supported her children plus nephews and nieces (putting them through school and university) through farming and selling a bit of homebrew on the side.
So what you might say?? Except Polly managed to do this while devastating civil war racked her country for decades. Polly and her family were placed in a refugee camp for 20 years and had to abandon her farmland where fighters burnt her citrus orchard to the ground (except for three remaining trees). While the vast majority of refugees relied on aid handouts for survival Polly travelled back and forth to her original farm to cultivate crops in order to derive some kind of income.
This is not your average women; however the more African women I meet, I realise that their resilience and capacity to support their families in adverse conditions is astounding and humbling.
As I come away from Africa one thing is blatantly obvious to me; the backbone of Africa’s food system belongs to the woman.
The reasons for this are buried deep in culture and come back to gender equality – or the lack of. This is where I tread carefully as every culture has its’ challenges and in Polly’s one of them is the distribution of workload between man and woman. While women will work typically from 6am right through to 10pm, men will start work at 7am and knock off at 10:30am.
While my time was incredibly brief at Polly’s place it had a big impact on my understanding and insight into women’s role in improving food security for their families and communities.
Polly’s story is only one story amongst the many millions of small-hold women farmers around the world. Over the next year I will walk you through some of these stories, of women’s lives and their thoughts. As they are shared with me, I will share them with you.
In my next blog I’ll to dig more into the gender balance discussion and introduce a small yet effective project called ‘Reflect Circles’ which is helping to shift this in-balance.
Hannah Moloney traveled to Tanzania and Uganda with ActionAid in July 2011 as part of the Hunger Busting Blogger training program. She maintains full editorial independence and, therefore, all views expressed in this post are her own and do not necessarily represent those of ActionAid.
