In the Kingdom of Eswatini, rural women have been the custodians of local and indigenous seeds and preserving biodiversity for generations. Officially founded in 2011, the Swaziland Rural Women’s Assembly (SRWA) has brought together over 20.000 women across the country to reclaim their traditional knowledge of seed sharing. In the Dare to Trust project, the SRWA has developed a new Agroecology Demonstration Center as a learning facility for rural farmers and produced a seed bank to help the 20.000 seed savers in their community.
About one in every six people, particularly women, directly rely on forests for their lives and livelihoods, especially for food. This shows how important non-timber forest products (NTFPs) and forests are to ensure community resilience. Not only as a source of food, water and income, but also because of their cultural and spiritual meaning.
Analog forestry is a transformative approach to the ecological restoration of degraded lands. Natural forests are used as guides to create ecologically sustainable landscapes, which support the social and economical needs of local communities.
Fundo Socioambiental CASA / CASA Socio-Environmental Fund
Traditional development aid keeps Africa in a state of aid dependency, but development cooperation is essential to break this post-colonial dependency, argues Melvin van der Veen in response to an interview in NRC Handelsblad with the Cameroonian economist Célestin Monga. By breaking off this cooperation on the basis of equality, we are actually stifling the voices of African civil society organisations, indigenous communities, youth and women's movements and human rights defenders, and we are not solving global problems.