International Women’s Day is a global day in celebrating the social, economic, cultural and political achievements of women. The day also marks a call to action for accelerating gender parity. This three (3) day event was attended by an average of 200 smallholder farmers. All together through discussion, sharing of experiences, reflection and presentations, farmers re-affirmed their spirit and assumed a single struggle of “women emancipation, all farmers’ emancipation”.
The panel discussion was organised by women’s panellist and the aim was to bring out the real experience and practices on land ownership and financial services to the smallholder farmers in Mngeta. These two were the main topics for the commemoration activity.
Natalia, a smallholder farmer in Mngeta opened up the panel by sharing her experience on land where she pointed out land scarcity problems to smallholder farmers Mngeta and Kilombero at large. She went further by saying “We have no land while the Investors in our area owns large portions of land which in fact belonged to us previously and currently he has been renting the area to smallholder farmers who in return pay 1 sack of paddy after harvesting per each acreage rented”.
Natalia despite of admitting to the fact that the ‘land question’ particularly in their area is not gender biased she made it clear that women on the other hand due to a number of factors can encounter great challenges in land ownership from their fellow male counterpart especially once married. “We legally owned the land and we had with us the purchasing receipts and later on came an order that we had to vacate as the area is re-owned by the new investor and up to date we don’t have areas that we can use to produce not mentioning for establishing permanent settlements”- she concluded.
Another panellist presented the challenges of financial service access in Mngeta where she explained on the exploitative nature of the commercial bank loans coupled by stringent rules, un-timely loan disbursement, unaffordable interest rates on the loans and lastly the third panellist namely Calista gave out the Village Community Bank (VICOBA) experience where she put it clearly that VICOBA of recently in their area (Mngeta) have started the exploitative nature likely to the one of the so called “formal financial system” of the commercial banks.
In this commemoration the District Commissioner (DC) for Kilombero District attended the event as the Guest of Honour who addressed the mass by firstly commenting on the tremendous work that is being done by MVIWATA in uniting smallholder farmers in the country.
The District Commissioner (DC) went further by advising smallholder farmers on their role in protecting their land and that they shouldn’t always resolve their poverty crisis problems by selling their land to investors.
At the end of the event all participants agreed that the need for land advocacy in Mngeta is bigger and that all participants have re-affirmed to continue with their struggle on land regardless of the challenges faced, to have serious solidarity among farmers through groups and networks in advocacy of their challenges, to resort into group saving and lending (VICOBA) as mode of financing smallholder farmers, groups which will be owned by all farmers for smallholder farmers’ interest.
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