From Africa Recovery, Vol.13#4 (December 1999), Briefs page

A prize for women farmers

On behalf of all African women food farmers, Ms. Nagbila Aisseta, from the village of Zincko in Burkina Faso, accepted the 1999 Africa Prize for Leadership for the Sustainable End of Hunger, at a ceremony held in New York on 9 October. A few days later she returned home to begin a months-long relay, in which the prize statue will be passed, like a torch, from one group of women farmers to another, in Burkina Faso, Benin, Ghana, Senegal, Uganda, Malawi and Nigeria.

Presented annually by the Hunger Project, an international non-governmental organization headquartered in New York, the prize honours efforts toward improving food security in Africa. In 1999 for the first time, it was awarded symbolically to all African women food farmers, to highlight their fundamental role. Although women produce about 80 per cent of sub-Saharan Africa's food, notes a Hunger Project study, they own only about 1 per cent of the land, receive less than 7 per cent of farm extension services and obtain less than 10 per cent of the credit given to small-scale farmers.

"For women food farmers to get what they need," Ugandan Vice-President Speciosa Wandira Kazibwe told the awards ceremony, "policies must change and budgets must increase. We, as African leaders, must take responsibility for making these changes. As an African woman leader, you can count on me to make every effort to unleash this great river of women's creativity."

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