Women Fighting Hunger

Members of the Dugpaco ("Come Home") women's group tend their large garden plot, which is supported by Mercy Corps. Photo: Aleka Badawasou Jacques/Mercy Corps

Under an unrelenting Ugandan sun, I watched as women tended to their community garden in Wol, a parish in northern Uganda’s Pader District. With bowed backs, each woman carefully attended to fledgling onions, cabbages and eggplants, plunging their hands into the moist earth in order to aerate the soil and remove weeds.

I admired the women’s ability to do such physical work with grace and humor. They gossiped and giggled in brightly-coloured skirts, as tiny beads of sweat began to aggregate on their noses and lips, eventually sliding down their faces in steady streams.

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Zesino Mohamed Shiro, 50, lives in the drought-stricken village of Lakole, Ethiopia. Photo: Thatcher Cook for Mercy Corps

In many places around the world, drought withers lawns. In Ethiopia, drought withers lives.

"When I was young, I was beautiful," says 50-year-old Zesino Mohamed Shiro. "But years of drought and not having enough to eat makes you old."

I tell her that she's still very pretty. She scoots closer.

"I've had 10 children. Six of them are still living," she continues. It's a story that I will hear several more times today.

Zesino lives in the tiny village of Lakole, Ethiopia, a place where no cars come and the nearest market is three hours away on foot. Lakole — and hundreds of other villages in the country's easternmost reaches — has withered under unending waves of drought. And even when feeble crops survived to produce meagre grains, they were mostly stolen by swarms of birds.

But, even faced with such an overwhelming challenge, Zesino and her neighbors weren't about to give in. They're digging in and fighting to save the only place they've ever known as home.

Mercy Corps' RAIN programme is helping villages like Lakole improve their farmland — and their odds — through innovative agricultural techniques, erosion control, better livestock care and crop seeds that yield a better harvest, even in times of drought.

"Since Mercy Corps came here, we're protecting our farmland," Zesino says. "We've tackled the challenge, rehabilitating our fields, vaccinating our livestock and planting forage for our animals.

"Even through the hard times, I've always been happy living here," she proudly states. "With help like this, we will soon turn this small village into a town."

That's one thing that drought hasn't withered in Lakole: the spirit of women like Zesino.

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Annie Garfree, mother of six children, is participating in a Mercy Corps cocoa farming programme so she can earn more money and provide for her family. Photo: Nancy Farese for Mercy Corps

Annie Garfree has six children, three daughters and three sons. Only her boys are currently in school. But she's eager to make sure all of them get an education.

Annie is a farmer who's learning new methods of planting, growing and harvesting so she can earn more money and provide for her family. She's one of 25 farmers participating in a Mercy Corps programme on a cocoa farm that was started by our Phoenix Fund. More than half of the farmers in this programme, and in Liberia in general, are women. President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf has called agriculture the main engine of Liberia's economic development. Mercy Corps is helping Annie and other Liberian women farmers meet their country's own goals by becoming more successful farmers.

I sat with Annie under a tree in the cocoa nursery, talking about her life and cocoa farming. First, she had to rehabilitate the land — clearing the dense undergrowth called "brushing" here in Liberia — with a machete. Then she had to dig out the roots. It's grueling labour, and Annie is tiny, about five feet tall and as lean as a sapling. But she's strong.

I hold up my arm next to hers and challenge her to a mock arm-wrestle, and we both burst out laughing. Before even starting, it's clear who the winner would be.

Annie just got her first batch of cocoa seedlings. She carried the plants to her farm, about a half-hour walk from the Mercy Corps nursery. There, she's learning planting techniques like how to plant banana trees between the rows of cocoa seedlings. The bananas provide necessary protection from the sun while the cocoa plants are getting established, as well as a much-needed cash crop for farmers like Annie until the cocoa trees begin bearing fruit.

"For a long time," says Annie, "I had no hope. Now, with the seedlings from Mercy Corps, and the training I'm getting, I'll be able to pay tuition to send my children to school."

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Photo: Jeremy Barnicle/Mercy Corps

Life here in Bo Kone, Myanmar, a village of about a thousand people, has never been easy. Located on an isolated island in the Irrawaddy Delta, it's about an hour's boat ride to the nearest town.

And then Cyclone Nargis tore through the village last year, killing about a quarter of its inhabitants and submerging in salt water its acres of rice fields.

Those who survived — including Myint Aye, the village geography teacher and a 47-year-old mother of two — lost everything.

"People were already malnourished," says Hadi Akther, a local agronomist who runs Mercy Corps' food security and livelihoods recovery programme in the Delta. "We wanted to find a way not just to restore the rice farms they depended on, but to enable people to diversify their diets and eat more nutritious meals."

Before the cyclone, people had to go about an hour away by boat to get vegetables. The hassle and expense meant few did.

With that challenge in mind, Mercy Corps helped Myint's and 300 other families in Bo Kone establish "kitchen gardens" — small growing plots that will help satisfy household food needs — by providing seeds, gardening tools and technical training.

Photo: Miguel Samper for Mercy Corps

And as Myanmar moves into its "winter" — when the average temperature is 80 degrees instead of 90 — Mercy Corps is ramping up a winter vegetable programme that equips these households to grow a whole new set of crops.

Women are the owners of these gardens. They see keeping their family fed as one of their primary responsibilities. It's the same story throughout the developing world, where 60 to 80 of the food is grown by women — most of it for their own tables.

Myint planted 10 different crops, including green beans, pumpkin, watercress and rosehips. She has two goals in mind: increasing the nutritional value of the meals she cooked, and selling some of the yield to educate her children.

"Without this programme I never could have grown such a big, diverse garden," she says. "I want to use the money I make to send my eldest son to college in the city."

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