Women farmers are particularly affected by climate change, food insecurity and disaster, so we have to drive gender equality and decrease women’s vulnerability in the sector.

Up to 30,000 small farmers in East Africa, mostly in Kenya, have adopted the push-pull method to control pests and weeds in maize, the staple crop.

Not even the least alert of drivers can miss the sign along the busy road 30 kilometres south of Lusaka: “Look, Conservation Farming Pays!”

Chirimanyemba is a marvel among women, and men! Watching her digging holes in dry ground earlier this year, her neighbours thought the old lady had gone berserk.

One of the key components of global action on climate change will be measures to adapt to changes that are already unavoidable.

For some seven million Congolese living in Kinshasa the only meat and poultry they could buy to eat since the 1980s was frozen imports from Western countries, distributed locally by a few local businessmen.

When in power, the Sierra Leone People’s Party (SLPP) promised that thanks to its pursuit of a pro-agriculture agenda, no Sierra Leonean would go to bed hungry by 2007. But the appointed date came and the people were still hungry. Unfortunately for the SLPP, it was an election year.

Without agricultural development at the core of Africa’s progress, there will be no development on the continent.

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 rural areas, and carry voices from the countryside back to the seats of power.

Theatre and agriculture are two words not often seen together. But they are stepping out in tandem across Southern Africa in support of raising farm productivity and incomes.

A play that will soon be put on for rural people and policy-makers alike was performed in Maputo at the week-long dialogue on agriculture policy organised by the Food, Agriculture and Natural Resources Policy Analysis Network (FANRPAN).