admin | July 17, 2026
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Collect community voices celebrating the contributions of women. This could be a call-in segment or vox pops.