Why Sustainable Agriculture caught Artistri Sud's Attention

Providing context for Artistri Sud's expansion to focus on women in sustainable agriculture

As many of you know, AWE/Artistri Sud has been working with low-income women in the global south for over a decade (exactly 10 years as a registered charity this year!).

We support women to build or strengthen revenue streams that leverage their existing assets. We focus on heritage assets–so for many, that’s textiles with all the ancestral know-how involved about growing the hemp or the sheep, the weaving, the dyeing, the decoration–and provide an opportunity to build confidence, business skills, an entrepreneurship mindset, confidence, friendships, networks and more–and turn it into sustainable revenue.

This in turn has two important outcomes:

one is, with the actual revenue that they’ve earned and now tend to have more control over, they invest in food, health, education, and
the second is that with their new confidence and revenue-generating skills–because that’s the kind of society we all live in–they have more influence over their households and eventually, their communities and beyond.

We’ve now worked in 8 different countries on 3 continents, directly trained nearly 600 women and impacted through them nearly 7000 more. 75% of graduates on average double their incomes within a year; over 90% report greater confidence, willingness to take risks, and similar indicators linked to agency and empowerment.

In the past 4 or 5 years, we’ve been increasingly asked to bring our approach to the women’s farming activities.

"As Covid wore on, I spoke to more and more women who were concerned about the health of their families and communities, which is linked to the health of their fields, concerned about growing food in soil contaminated with chemical pesticides and fertilizers, concerned about the imminent loss of their ancestral knowledge about plants, nutrition and traditional medicine – all these cultural assets which are being squeezed out by industrial approaches to medicine and agriculture. These rural women expressed concern with an urgency that keeps growing," said Jennifer Lonergan, PhD, Executive Director of AWE.

It’s this urgent concern that gives rise to Artistri Sud’s strategic decision to pivot and focus its attention on sustainable agriculture. It’s this urgent concern about the decline of our food systems that creates a need for conversations like these.

In June 2023, we were thrilled to be able to welcome a panel of experts and farmers to share their experience and knowledge about what some of the issues and implications are; what they and others are doing to bring health back into our food systems; and what we can all do.

They’ve given us some ideas about how to contribute to healthier food systems going forward:

Eat differently, support local farmers by signing up for CSAs.

Also, you can support Artistri Sud, as we make supporting women farmers in their sustainable farming practices a strategic priority.

The women we work with already are farmers, and as mentioned, they’re increasingly concerned about the health of their families and communities.

Women are producing between 60-80% of the food in the developing world, and about 50% of the global food production. They are the champions of biodiversity, which assures the resilience of crops and plant life in general.

Studies have shown that women globally may be growing as many as 230 species of plants in their home gardens – for generations, they have been responsible for creating biodiverse environments.

By focusing our attention on sustainable agriculture as the source of revenue for women–and building new programming around that–we can have greater impact, since we are helping strengthen revenue streams in the area where women are already labouring the most (in terms of time), and also since it’s in the domain which also provides a real opportunity to directly improve the health and nutrition of their families.

We are looking for volunteers now, to help us move forward at all levels. Please see our Take Action page to learn how you can help and get involved in this exciting new expansion!