Theme pack
Women play essential roles in their families and communities, nurturing, caring, and feeding children, husbands, parents, siblings, and neighbours. Women also play essential roles across agrifood systems, producing, processing and selling the food that sustains families, communities and economies. Yet their contributions often go unrecognized, and persistent inequalities limit their access to resources, opportunities, and decision making.
The International Year of the Woman Farmer (IYWF 2026) highlights these realities, and calls for collective action and increased investments to close gender gaps, strengthen women’s livelihoods and promote their leadership across agrifood value chains. By advancing gender equality and creating conditions for women and girls engaged along agrifood value chains to thrive, the Year contributes to building fairer, more inclusive and sustainable agrifood systems for all.
Join in marking the International Year of the Woman Farmer by planning an episode, a series of episodes, or even a campaign celebrating the valuable contributions of women farmers. This can be part of your submission for the Liz Hughes Award for Her Farm Radio. Applications open next week. Here are some ideas:
1. Interview women farmers or agribusiness leaders about their successes. Highlight the practices women are using to get good harvests, to store their harvests well, and to transform crops into new products for sale. You can also ask about the challenges women are facing or the challenges they have overcome in their work in the agrifood value chain.
2. Interview women leaders in your community about the challenges and needs of women. This might be political or community leaders, the leaders of cooperatives or nonprofits. Your interview could touch on challenges related to access to land, finance, inputs, or training, or perhaps the burden of unpaid care work.
3. Interview a gender equality expert about the gender gaps in the agrifood system. When discussing any aspect of the agrifood system, it is important to consider: gender division of labour; control over resources and assets, including income; decision-making power; time use and unpaid care work; gender positioning in the value chain.
4. Broadcast radio spots celebrating women in the agrifood system. This can be mini-profiles of successful women in your community or celebrations of the contributions of women to production, harvesting, post-harvest, processing, and marketing.
5. Share stories about the successes of women in your news segment. Use our Barza Wire stories to highlight the contributions of women in communities across Africa.
6. Collect community voices celebrating the contributions of women. This could be a call-in segment or vox pops.
Resources for your programming on women farmers.
Radio spots
Unpaid care
Backgrounders
Women in agrifood systems in Uganda
Gender inequalities in land rights in Africa
Women’s roles in marketing farm produce
Interview scripts
Women benefit from growing high-value crops
Improving women’s access to farmland in northern Ghana
Ivorian cocoa: Access to finance is the key to success for women in the cocoa bean processing industry
Barriers to women’s participation in farming in Mali
Three fishing ladies with a message about solar dryers
Barza Wire
Burkina Faso: Women boost shea butter income with good harvesting and certification
Côte d’Ivoire: Women cocoa producers lead the battle for access to land
Senegal: Women plant local fruit tree species to address land degradation
Nigeria: Ogoni women lead reforestation efforts in the Niger Delta (Mongabay)
Ghana: Women taking the lead in Farmer-Managed Natural Regeneration
DRC: Women farmers in Kasaï-Central learn new techniques in fields
Mali: Women preserve ancestral knowledge to protect the forest and feed the community
Mali: Women adopt mechanized rice harvesting and drying to reduce post-harvest losses
Togo: Cashew nut production, a profitable activity for women
Sénégal: Groundnut is like gold for rural women