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Across Africa, women are the backbone of food systems, natural resource stewardship and community resilience. They cultivate food, protect ecosystems, preserve indigenous knowledge and hold communities together through generations of change. Yet many women continue to face significant barriers to land ownership, meaningful participation in decision-making and access to the resources needed to thrive.
Addressing these challenges requires more than policy reform alone. It requires organized communities, sustained women’s leadership and movements that recognize grassroots women not as beneficiaries of change, but as its primary architects.
This conviction shaped our recent South–South learning exchange with Women and Land in Zimbabwe (WLZ), who joined us in May 2026 for a five-day visit across Laikipia and Kitui Counties in Kenya. The exchange brought together grassroots women leaders, community champions and movement partners to share experiences on women’s land rights, community governance, agroecology and movement building learning from each other across borders and contexts.
The exchange opened with an opportunity to reflect on the journey of GROOTS Kenya movement, a journey built in three decades through grassroots organizing, women’s leadership and collective action.
Founded in 1995 following the Fourth UN Conference on Women in Beijing, GROOTS Kenya emerged from a commitment to ensure that grassroots women were visible, heard and actively engaged in decisions affecting their lives and communities. The movement took root in Likii, Laikipia County and Mathare, Nairobi County, beginning with 500 community groups.
Three decades later, we have grown into a national movement of over 5,000 grassroots women-led groups across 30 counties in Kenya. That growth has been driven by a core belief: that grassroots women are the foundation for shifting systems of power and that their voice and agency are the most durable levers of change.
This history provided essential context for the Women and Land Zimbabwe delegation, grounding the exchange not just in current programs, but in the long, deliberate work of movement building.
One of the most significant focuses of the exchange was women’s participation in land governance structures and the transformation that becomes possible when communities are organized around this goal.
In Laikipia North, the delegation visited pastoralist communities where land and culture are deeply intertwined. For generations, customary norms have shaped who holds decision-making authority over community land often to the exclusion of women. Despite playing a central role in managing natural resources, grazing lands and household livelihoods, women in many pastoralist communities have historically been absent from formal land governance structures.
GROOTS Kenya has been working with communities across Laikipia North to shift this reality. Through capacity strengthening on the Community Land Act, 2016, GROOTS Kenya has supported women’s integration into 13 Community Land Registers across Laikipia North; two of which the delegation engaged directly: Musul Community Land and Tiamamut Community Land. These visits grounded the broader figures in lived experience, showing what inclusion in a land register actually means for the women whose names now appear in it.
Alongside this work, Men for Women champions have played an important role as allies reflecting on their own responsibility in transforming traditional governance systems and creating space for women’s leadership within them.
The story of Musul Community Land illustrates this transformation plainly.
Musul Community Land was registered in 2020 under the Community Land Act. Through community sensitization supported by GROOTS Kenya covering the Act itself, registration processes, title deeds and the importance of women’s inclusion the community undertook a review of its register in 2023.
“Before, we did not register women. We only had three women in the register, and that was because they were widows,”
Following that review, the number of women included in the register increased from 3 to 187, a shift that strengthened women’s recognition, participation and rights within the community land governance structure.
At Tiamamut, the delegation witnessed what that shift looks like when women move from inclusion on paper to leadership in practice.
Mary Maasai became the first woman elected to the Community Land Management Committee (CLMC) in her community, a milestone that reflects both the progress made and the work still ahead. Through CLMCs, women are now able to influence decisions about how land is managed, protected and passed on to future generations.
Sisi kama kina mama tunapopata nafasi ya kuongoza na kufanya maamuzi kuhusu ardhi, hatujifikirii sisi wenyewe tu, tunalinda familia zetu na jamii zetu.
“When women have a seat where decisions about land are made, we are not only speaking for ourselves, we are protecting the future of our families and our communities.”
The Women and Land in Zimbabwe delegation brought critical comparative insights from their own context one shaped by a fundamentally different land governance framework.
In Zimbabwe, land is state-owned and allocated through government leasing systems. Community members do not hold title in the same way as under Kenya’s Community Land Act, and this structural difference creates distinct vulnerabilities. The delegation highlighted key challenges their communities face:
Despite these differences in governance architecture, a clear shared lesson emerged from the comparative discussions: legal empowerment matters. In both Kenya and Zimbabwe, paralegal training and community knowledge of land rights frameworks are among the most effective tools available to grassroots women and communities seeking to defend their land and influence decisions that affect them.
Women’s rights to land are strengthened when communities are organized, informed and able to advocate for themselves regardless of whether the legal framework begins from community ownership or state allocation.
Beyond land governance, the exchange showcased how grassroots women are leading climate action through agroecology and sustainable livelihoods and how farmer-generated knowledge is driving practical solutions.
At the Nanyuki Demonstration Farm in Laikipia County, hosted by lead farmer Cecilia Mmburugu, the delegation experienced this directly. Since 2023, the farm has grown into a living learning space where farmers, community groups and institutions gain practical, hands-on knowledge on sustainable agriculture.
The farm demonstrates a range of approaches developed and tested by farmers themselves from seed banking, Biofertilizers and biopesticides, Vermicomposting, Indigenous crops and vegetables, Traditional seed systems and Integrated farming practices.
Together, these approaches are helping women farmers reduce reliance on costly external inputs, strengthen household food security, preserve indigenous knowledge and build resilience against increasingly unpredictable climate conditions.
One innovation that captured the attention of the delegation was Azolla a nutrient-rich aquatic plant used as a sustainable, low-cost supplement in poultry feed. Its affordability and local availability make it a practical example of how community-sourced solutions can reduce farming costs while supporting climate-resilient livelihoods.
“Agroecology has shown us that farmers already have knowledge that can transform our food systems. When we preserve seeds, use natural inputs and learn from each other, we become more resilient.”
From Laikipia, the learning continued in Kitui County, where grassroots women shared experiences on adapting to climate challenges through integrated farming approaches including poultry keeping, dairy farming, seed preservation and sustainable land management. The Kitui exchanges deepened the conversation begun in Laikipia: not just about individual techniques, but about how agroecology, as a practice and a philosophy, enables communities to strengthen food systems while responding to climate change.
This work is part of a broader effort by GROOTS Kenya to embed gender-transformative agroecology across our programming. To date, more than 3,500 farmers have been supported to adopt sustainable farming practices that protect the environment while improving livelihoods, a figure that reflects years of community-led learning across multiple counties.
Beyond the specific program sites, the exchange created space for deeper reflection on what it takes to build durable, community-led movements.
Discussions across the five days reinforced that strong movements are built over time through trust, collaboration, shared vision and communities taking genuine ownership of their priorities. There are no shortcuts and there is no single model that transfers wholesale from one context to another.
For Women and Land in Zimbabwe, the exchange offered practical insights into grassroots organizing and women’s participation in land governance and a chance to see, in action, what three decades of sustained movement building can produce.
“The exchange showed us the power of organized communities. Learning from grassroots women in Kenya has strengthened our understanding of how women’s leadership can shape land governance and community transformation.”
For GROOTS Kenya, the exchange reinforced the value of South–South learning and the particular power that comes from connecting women-led movements across borders who are working on related struggles in different contexts. Movements grow when women share knowledge, learn from one another and build collective solutions grounded in lived experience.
The exchange between GROOTS Kenya and Women and Land in Zimbabwe reaffirmed what three decades of movement building have consistently demonstrated: when grassroots women are organized, their knowledge becomes action.
As women-led movements continue to learn from one another across borders, one truth holds: transformation does not happen in isolation. It grows through solidarity, shared experience and communities that take ownership of their future.
