Charles Mushizi and Patrick Chitumba

“Women on their own cannot implement all the changes that are required for their lives to improve.” - Sithembile Ndema. Credit: Zahira Kharsany/IPS

Take your seats: the curtain has risen on a fresh strategy to link small farmers and policy-makers across Southern Africa. Theatre has been chosen as the means to explain agricultural policy to people in rural areas, and carry voices from the countryside back to the seats of power.

The Women And Re-aligning Markets (WARM) programme will go into villages in Malawi and Mozambique – it is later to be extended to the rest of Southern Africa – to put policy across to the people it is meant to benefit..

Sithembile Ndema, the Food, Agriculture and Natural Resources Policy Analysis Network (FANRPAN) programme officer in charge of the WARM project said the initiative is meant to turn a spotlight on constraints on women farmers experience.

“Women are often marginalised in business relations and (they) have minimal control over access to factors of production like land, inputs such as seed and fertiliser, credit and technology.”

Ndema said theatre would be used to engage leaders, service providers and policy makers, to encourage community participation, and to carry out research into the needs of women farmers.

“Women on their own cannot implement all the changes that are required for their lives to improve.”

Zimbabwean minister for national healing and reconciliation, Sekai Holland, applauded FANRPAN for the project, which is funded by the U.S.-based Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

“Women have long been marginalised, even after independence. This network will definitely work in their favor and I call upon this network to spread it to other countries,” she said.