Water and Food

  For my final blog post, I will be focussing on monoculture as a colonial legacy on the African continent.  Tea plantation in Rwanda Monoculture is a unanimous legacy of colonization across the continent and beyond ( Kanu, 2012 ; Watkins, 2018 ; Havik et al., 2018) . “Egypt produced cotton, Rwanda-Urundi was almost completely dedicated to growing coffee, and Upper Volta specialized in palm oil” (Kanu, 2012, pg 127) . In the Brazilian state of Bahia, palm oil has been extracted for five centuries ( Watkins, 2018 ). In Guinea-Bissau, the cashew crop-boom began in the 90s, where cashews were grown by over half of agricultural households ( Havik et al., 2018 ). The practice of monoculture and its export destinations are all practices mastered during the colonial period, meant to increase efficiency and productivity, for the benefit of empires (Ross, 2017) . The histories of mass exploitation and violence expressed in the environment, have manifested into a crisis in post-colonial Africa (

  Last blog, we looked at innovative agriculture in informal settlements in Kibera, Kenya. Today, I will be taking an intersectional approach, in which we look at the importance of empowering women farmers in Kenya. Women bean farmers in Kenya In Kenya, 42% to 65% of the agricultural labour force makeup is women (Diiro, et al., 2018). Although women are crucial in agricultural and local water management, it is often done without pay or credit and on top of their domestic care (Nelson, et al., 2012) . This is due to gender inequality and patriarchy in many countries in the Global South (Nelson, et al., 2012) . Women farmers are thus responsible for a large portion of their community’s food security (Mlaba, 2023) . Despite this immense responsibility, for many women farmers in Kenya and many parts of broader sub-Saharan Africa, patriarchal systems exacerbate gender inequality and problems of access (Diiro, et al., 2018; Mwololo et al., 2022 ) For example, only 0.5% of women have access