The Rural Women’s Assembly (RWA) is a self-organized network of national rural women’s movements, assemblies, grassroots organizations and chapters of mixed peasant unions, federations and movements across 10 countries in southern Africa. The RWA focuses on building a feminist approach within the movement, contributing to food sovereignty movements across the Continent, challenging corporate power, and advocating and building mechanisms to hold state institutions accountable to the demands of food sovereignty and land movements across southern Africa. The six objectives of RWA’s work are:

1. Mobilize rural women, peasants and small farmers across the Southern African Development Community (SADC) to critically engage their governments and global governance structures on food, agriculture, seed, climate justice and land policy frameworks
2. Develop concrete campaigns and local processes of self-organization aimed at the protection of farmer-managed seed systems,  against the commodification of nature and the privatization of common goods
3. Strengthen country level leadership, country chapters and resources towards local sustainability
4. Actively participate and lead in the people’s space–especially spaces that can advance the interests of rural women–to oppose racism, patriarchy, xenophobia and violence against women and children
5. Integrate work on gender-based violence (GBV) and demands to stop GBV across programs of the RWA
6. Build awareness on the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas, and develop campaigns that make these rights real