Mariama Sonko’s voice echoes around 40 female farmers sitting in the shade of cashew trees. They scribbled notes, brows furrowed in concentration, while her speech was punctuated by the sound of fruit falling.
This quiet village in Senegal is the headquarters of We Are the Solution, a 115,000-strong rural women’s rights movement in West Africa. Sonko, the organization’s president, is training female farmers in cultures where women are often excluded from ownership of the land they work closely with.
In Senegal, female farmers make up 70% of the agricultural workforce and produce 80% of the crops, but have less access to land, education and capital than men, according to the United Nations.
“We work from morning to night, but everything we do, what do we get out of it?” Sonko asked.
She believes that when rural women gain access to land, responsibilities and resources, it has a ripple effect throughout the community. Her movement is training female farmers who have traditionally been denied access to education, explaining their rights and funding women-led agricultural projects.
Across West Africa, women often do not own land because they are thought to leave the community when they marry. But when they moved to their husband’s house, they were not given land because they were not related by blood.
Sonko grew up watching her mother struggle to raise young children after her father’s death.
“If she had land, she could feed us,” she recalled, her usually booming voice now softer. Instead, Sankoh had to marry young, give up his studies, and leave his ancestral home.
After moving to her husband’s town at age 19, Sanko and several other women convinced a landowner to rent them a small plot of land in exchange for a share of their harvest. They planted fruit trees and started a market garden. Five years later, when the tree became overgrown with papayas and grapefruits, the owner kicked them off.
The experience left a deep impression on Sankoh.
“This motivates me to fight so that women can have the space to grow and manage their own rights,” she said. That work later began when she took a job at a women’s charity funded by Catholic Relief Services, coordinating small loans for rural women.
“Women farmers are invisible,” said Raul Tal, research director of the Initiative for Agriculture and Rural Prospects, a Senegalese rural think tank. This is despite the fact that women on average spend two to four hours more working on farms each day than men.
But when women make money, they reinvest it in their communities, health and children’s education, Tal said. Men spend some money on household expenses but can choose to spend the rest however they want. Sanko cited common examples such as finding a new wife, drinking alcohol and buying fertilizers and pesticides for crops that make money rather than provide food.
Encouraged by her husband, who died in 1997, Sonko chose to invest in other women. Her training center now employs more than 20 people and is supported by small charities such as the Agroecological Fund and the CLIMA Fund.
In a recent week, Sonko and her team trained more than 100 women from three countries: Senegal, Guinea-Bissau and The Gambia in agroforestry (growing trees and crops together as a protection against extreme weather) and micro-gardening, i.e. Grow food in small spaces. A space when access to land is nearly inaccessible.
One trainee, Binta Diatta, said We Are the Solution purchased irrigation equipment, seeds and fencing (an investment of US$4,000) and helped women in the town obtain land for vegetable gardens, part of the One of more than 50 vegetable gardens sponsored by the organization.
Diatta said when she started making money, she spent it on food, clothing and her children’s education. Her efforts were noticed.
“The next season, all the men accompanied us to the vegetable garden because they thought it was valuable,” she said, recalling them just to witness it.
Now comes another challenge affecting women and men alike: climate change.
Temperatures in Senegal and the surrounding region are rising 50% above the global average, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, while the United Nations Environment Program says rainfall could fall by 38% in the coming decades.
Where Sanko lives, the rainy season has become shorter and less predictable. As sea levels rise, seawater is invading tidal estuaries and rice paddies near mangroves. In some cases, yield losses were so severe that farmers abandoned their rice fields.
But adapting to global warming has proven to be an advantage for women, as they adopt climate innovations much faster than men, said Ena Derenoncourt, an investment specialist in the women-led agriculture program at agricultural research organization AICCRA.
“They have no choice because they are the most vulnerable and the ones most affected by climate change,” Drennoncourt said. “They are the most motivated to find solutions.”
On a recent day, Sonko gathered 30 prominent female rice farmers to document hundreds of local rice varieties. She shouts out the name of the rice—hundreds of years old, named after famous female farmers and passed down from generation to generation—and the women respond with what they call the rice in the village.
Protecting indigenous rice varieties is not only key to adapting to climate change but also emphasizes women’s role as traditional seed keepers.
“The seeds are completely feminized and bring value to women in the community,” Sanko said. “That’s why we’re working on their behalf to give them more confidence and responsibility in agriculture.”
Understanding the hundreds of seeds and how they respond to different growing conditions is critical to giving women a more influential role in their communities.
Sanko claims to have seeds suitable for various conditions in mangroves, including those that are too rainy, too dry, and even more salt-tolerant for mangroves.
Last year, she produced 2 tons of rice on half a hectare of land, without using synthetic pesticides or fertilizers that are heavily subsidized in Senegal. Yields more than doubled compared to plots in a 2017 Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations project in the same area that used exclusively chemical products.
“Our seeds are resilient,” said Sanko, sifting through clay pots filled with rice designed to preserve the seeds for decades. “Conventional seeds are not resistant to climate change and are very demanding. They require fertilizers and pesticides.”
Charles Katy, an expert on indigenous Senegalese wisdom who is helping document Sanco’s rice varieties, said the cultural intimacy between women farmers, their seeds and the land means they are more likely to avoid using chemicals that harm the soil. substance.
He noted organic fertilizers made from dung in Pinaceae, as well as biopesticides made from ginger, garlic and chili peppers.
One of Sonko’s trainees, Sounkarou Kébé, talks about her experiments with parasites in tomato fields. Instead of using artificial pesticides, she tried using the bark of a tree traditionally used in the Casamance region of Senegal to treat intestinal problems in humans caused by parasites.
After a week, all the illness was gone, Kebe said.
As dusk approaches at the training center and insects buzz in the background, Sonko prepares for another training session. “There’s so much need,” she said. She is now trying to establish seven more agricultural centers in southern Senegal.
She glanced back at the circle of women studying in the twilight and said, “My great fight in this movement is to make humanity understand the importance of women.”
Follow us on Google news ,Twitter , and Join Whatsapp Group of thelocalreport.in
