Never underestimate a woman with a smallholder farm.
Even though their farms account for only 12% of the world’s farmland, smallholder farmers grow 1/3 of the world’s food and nearly 70% of Africa’s. Floods, droughts and other climate disasters are already battering them, yet they receive less than 1% of all climate finance investment.
In the lead-up to COP30, a woman-led climate justice organization called Project Dandelion decided to call attention to the huge contributions of smallholders to make the case for more climate investment to protect their farms and livelihoods.
Unfortunately, the aid sector’s depictions of smallholders – and women farmers in particular – has exacerbated the problem. Smallholder and rural women farmers are almost always portrayed as helpless victims. In actuality, they are extremely innovative, and their ingenuity, methods and approaches are born out of a deep understanding of local ecosystems, making them incredibly worthy of investment.
When smallholders do receive climate investment, the results are striking, but we couldn’t present these impact stories like typical “farmer on location talking to camera” case studies and expect them to be watched or even noticed.
Using still photography shot on location in Ethiopia and India and animating and enhancing the stills with design and color, the two films capture the tenacity and optimism of the women farmers who are actively turning climate adversity into economic opportunity and creating more climate resilience for their communities.
In Southern Ethiopia, investment in women farmers is making water access reliable. The climate-smart irrigation techniques they’ve implemented enable year-round production and a greater diversity of crops, with a higher nutritional and economic value. As yields have increased, so have household incomes, and it’s strengthening the local economy.
A critical part of the campaign is getting people to speak out and make their voices heard. To make this easy and actionable with just a few clicks of a mouse, all campaign elements directed people to a URL where they could post pre-written tweets to leaders and COP30 attendees that call out the issue and the urgent need to re-allocate climate investment to include smallholder farmers.
The widget functionality allowed users to choose between eight pre-written, pre-populated tweets tagging multiple organizations, and users were encouraged to send them all and send them multiple times in the lead-up to COP30.
In Maharashtra, India, investment is equipping women farmers to become leaders in bamboo cultivation, creating climate-resilient, long-term livelihoods out of barren, unproductive land. Now they are part of a sustainable global supply chain, and the bamboo they grow will become furniture, flooring, textiles and paper.
The campaign was sponsored by the Gates Foundation in partnership with the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD).
Agency: WRTHY