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 Accessing Re-aligned Markets (WARM) programme will be pilot tested in villages across 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.

The play, written and directed by top Zimbabwean playwright Cont Mhlanga and featuring actors from Bulawayo’s award-winning Amakhosi Theatre, explores the challenges rural women face accessing farming inputs, particularly government subsidies. It is part of FANRPAN’s Women Accessing Realigned Markets (WARM) project.

The action of the play centres on Nkolomi, a village headman who dominates access to farming inputs. When seeds and fertiliser are somehow distributed without his approval, he orders everything be returned to him. His long-standing practice is to hand these vital commodities out to his cronies; his nepotism has deprived women – among them widows struggling to support their families alone – to the extent that some have gone three years without farming.

The story brings to the fore how local authorities sometimes undermine stated government policy and efforts by civil society to empower women. But Nkolomi is opposed by one desperate widow, by the area’s newly-elected member of parliament and by his own wife. The conflict over distribution of the goods involves the audience in an emotional journey through the real power struggles as they are played out in the village : between men and women, old and young, urban and rural.

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.  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 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.  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 a 3-year $900,000 grant given 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.

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The post above was adapted from articles written by three African journalists (Charles Mushizi, Patrick Chitumba, and Vusumuzi Sifile) during a recent journalist training conducted by IPS.