In Chiradzulu district in southern Malawi, Diana Sitima runs a 3.5-hectare organic farm where she grows fruits and vegetables alongside maize, and these days, buyers from Blantyre no longer make the journey to her. Instead, they come to her. "Now they are coming to us. They say our produce has a good taste," Sitima says—a simple testament to how the Rural Women's Assembly has helped shift the relationship between small-scale female farmers and their markets across Southern Africa.
The assembly's emergence matters because it addresses a paradox that constrains millions of rural women: they feed their communities and increasingly supply growing urban markets, yet lack the fundamental security and autonomy that land ownership provides. With nearly 170,000 members across 11 countries in Southern Africa, the Rural Women's Assembly has become what founding member Mercia Andrews calls "probably the biggest rural movement of women across Southern Africa," a network born in 2009 when 250 women activists, farmers, and land rights advocates met in South Africa to chart a different future.
The obstacles these women face are both systemic and personal. In Chiradzulu alone, 60 assembly members cultivate land but few hold titles to it—a legal and cultural reality that ripples through every farming decision they make. Lonely Kholowa's story crystallizes this vulnerability. In 1998, newly married, her parents gave her land to farm. But after her father died in 2009, her uncle claimed it, citing cultural rules about inheritance and her maternal lineage. Today she farms on land belonging to her husband and his relatives. "I don't have land of my own," she says plainly. "If something happens to him, I have nothing."
Sitima, by contrast, owns her land outright—a stability she and her husband built through years of saving and borrowing from institutions to purchase it. She is acutely aware that this advantage sets her apart. "Not many women farmers in the district have the advantages that I have; so we discuss how to deal with these challenges," she explains. Her farm demonstrates what agroecology can achieve: she keeps chickens, ducks, and pigs whose manure feeds her fields and a biogas digester, eliminating dependence on synthetic fertilizers while building soil health and resilience.
Agroecology has become central to the assembly's vision of member autonomy and food sovereignty. By promoting farmer-saved seeds, organic practices, and environmentally sustainable methods, the movement enables women to reduce costs, reclaim control over their production systems, and strengthen their communities' food security. Yet as Mercia Andrews emphasizes, this agricultural transformation remains incomplete without land rights. "If you don't own the land, then you're only partially controlled, because then the income, what you plant, how you plant, is often dependent on what the husband says," Andrews explains.
The assembly's strategy addresses this directly. Members bring land access issues to local councils and central governments, challenging what Andrews describes as "patriarchal conditions" enforced by traditional authorities and families. Legal action is now part of the toolkit. Andrews frames women's right to own land as inseparable from rights to food and water—a holistic vision where agricultural practice and legal protection reinforce each other.
From Chiradzulu's markets brimming with organically grown produce to regional assemblies advocating for policy change, the Rural Women's Assembly is reshaping what rural farming looks like across Southern Africa. But the movement's deepest work remains unfinished: securing the land titles that would transform these women from cultivators of land to owners of their own futures.