Written by Joyce Chimbi, a cohort three graduate of grantee partner ESAFF Uganda’s Agroecology School for Journalists & Communicators. Agroecology Fund supports this initiative with the aim of building the capacity of journalists and communicators to write and report on agroecology in their communities.
The Agroecology Fund works with a diverse pool of grassroots organisations and networks including Indigenous youth networks. Indigenous communities face existential threats to their ancestral lands from destructive forces of colonialism. These lands are crucial for sustenance and spiritual practices.
During the recent Agroecology Fund African Learning Exchange that brought together more than 100 farmers from diverse cultures and communities, Indigenous peoples shared about their journey in agroecology.
A Learning Journey
“We work with Indigenous communities in Kenya, particularly for the promotion of their social and cultural rights, said Bernard Loolasho – an Indigenous youth leader and convener at the Kenya Indigenous Youth Network. “Agroecology came into the picture when we started talking about the food sovereignty of Indigenous peoples and since then we have worked with the support of Agroecology Fund in three communities in Kenya. The Yaaku tribe in Laikipia, Endorois in Baringo and Sengwer people in Trans Nzoia, Cherang’any Hills.”
Ongoing interventions include support for creating seed banks with women in the Sengwer community in Cherang’any and agro-pastoralists farmers in Baringo as well as beekeeping farmers in Laikipia among the Yaaku community.
“So far, we have implemented the first year, and we have noticed successes in documenting culture, traditional practices and techniques of beekeeping and seed banking. We have managed to work with farmers, both the elderly and the young, and have facilitated exchanges in intergenerational knowledge transfer. It’s a learning journey. We long to see what else could come out of these interactions and our journey to food sovereignty as Indigenous peoples in Kenya. We are enjoying the journey and the learning,” he said.
Ultimately, he says, they would look forward to seeing how best indigenous peoples and indigenous voices are raised and how best to amplify them. For a very long time, Loolasho observed, indigenous people were not recognized and were significantly marginalized. Stressing that “even now, their rights to food in particular is not guaranteed. Their right to seeds is at risk. So, ours is a journey to food sovereignty for indigenous people.”
Identity and Land Rights
“I’m Juliana Loshiro, an Indigenous young woman in the Yaaku community. We live in Mukogodo Forest as hunter-gatherers. They have not recognized us as a tribe because our people settled in Mukogodo forest and that is where we are now fighting for identity. I’m the only remaining fluent speaker of the Yaaku dialect in my community after my grandfather Leriman who is 113 years old. I’m amongst 8,000 people who identify as Yaaku.”
Loshiro says “we are doing more of language and cultural utilization and trying our best to come up with a strategy to fight for all our rights – be it in culture, food security and land rights. Hunter-gatherers are facing a lot of challenges and we are essentially being evicted in our own lands. We are doing advocacy on the ground and writing memorandums to the government to consider us, because if we are pushed out of our homes, where will we go?”
“But we are more hopeful now and we have seen the light. We are using agroecological solutions to sustain ourselves even as we move into the future and we are also exploring value addition. We are good at beekeeping and using it to support our livelihoods. We have brought together more than 3,000 women who are interested in beekeeping and value addition and through such solutions, we are changing lives and narratives,” she said.
Diel Mochire Mwenge is a Chief among an Indigenous community called Batwa and, the director of the Programme Intégré pour le Développement du Peuple Pygmée in the Democratic Republic of Congo, a grantee partner of the Agroecology Fund. The organization works with local communities to promote agroecological solutions and more so, among the Indigenous people, creating linkages between farming and biodiversity preservation.
“We do all of this not only with technology, but also with the help of traditional knowledge in such areas as understanding when and where to plant. The Batwa are one of the two main indigenous hunter-gatherer communities in DRC and the population is about 100,000 in the Lake Tumba region of north-west DRC, and also a few thousand in Kivu near the Uganda and Rwanda borders,” he said.
Mwenge says besides increasing production, they are also doing value addition and working with farmers to improve access to the markets. Some of the challenges they face are linkages to markets since indigenous communities are often found in areas that are cut off from development and infrastructure.
All in all, the Chief recognized the Learning Exchange as a platform to deepen his understanding of agroecology within the context of indigenous, marginalized communities – learning and sharing with others in the East, Central and Africa region. The acquired knowledge, he said, will go into scaling their interventions.