She Feeds Africa – The Unseen Majority
She Feeds Africa – The Unseen Majority
Market day in Ghana – the end of a week that began long before sunrise.
Every morning, before the village roosters finish their argument with the dark, she is already walking to the field. Hoe on shoulder, baby on back, seeds in a tin tied to her waist.
She is the arable farmer and the pastoralist. She clears, plows, plants, weeds, harvests, threshes, winnows, stores, processes, cooks, and – when there is surplus – carries it miles to market on her head.
If the rain fails, she still has to feed the house. If the rain comes too hard, she still has to feed the house. Seven days a week, sun or harmattan, with or without a man beside her – if she does not work, nobody eats.
Less than 20 % of registered farmland is owned by women
1 % of agricultural credit reaches rural women
(FAO, World Bank, Africa Progress Panel 2013–2024)
The Invisible Hands That Carry the Continent
Across sub-Saharan Africa, women produce the majority of the calories that keep 1.4 billion people alive, yet:
- Her name is rarely on the land title – even when her husband dies.
- Her cooperative is rarely approved for a loan.
- Her storage barn is rarely insured.
- Her improved seed packet is rarely addressed to her.
- The extension officer still asks to speak to “the farmer” – meaning her brother or son.
She is not asking for charity. She is asking for the same tools men take for granted: secure rights to the soil she has worked since childhood, a savings account in her own name, a bag of fertilizer she can buy without a male co-signer, a road that doesn’t eat half her tomatoes before market.
When women farmers in Ghana were finally given the same access to fertilizer, seed, and training as men, their yields rose 30–300 % in the very first season.
— Ministry of Food and Agriculture, Ghana, 2021
She still guards next year’s harvest in granaries her grandmother taught her to build.
A Simple Truth
If Africa is to feed itself in this century, the fastest, cheapest, most proven way is not a new hybrid seed or another billion-dollar irrigation scheme.
It is to finally hand the tools, the titles, the credit, and the respect to the women who have been feeding us all along.
Because every day she wakes up and keeps Africa alive with her bare hands and an unbreakable back.
And every day the world pretends it doesn’t see her.
