Her Farm, Her Story: From Silence to Soil, From Injustice to Power
Our Story Begins in Morogoro
Our story starts in Morogoro, a lush region in eastern Tanzania at the foot of the Uluguru Mountains. Morogoro is where cool highland breezes meet fertile plains, where rice, maize, horticulture and sugar estates thrive, and where treasures like Mikumi National Park and Udzungwa Falls are just a drive away. Because it is close to our HQ in Dar es Salaam, it’s often the first place we take visitors who want to see our work in the field. One day, as we were driving back to Dar after visiting farmers, a visitor asked: If you were to describe Morogoro in your own words, what would you call it?, The answer came easily: A woman. Because just like a woman, Morogoro carries strength, nurtures life, and gives far more than it receives. That is also how we see the women who stand at the center of our work.
Why We Focus on Women Farmers: Across Africa, women are the hidden backbone of agriculture. They plant, weed, harvest, cook, sell, and care, yet their contributions are often invisible.
Many of the women we work with are: Single mothers, widows, or women with unsupportive partners, Farming on rented or insecure plots, Excluded from formal financial systems because they lack collateral or documented credit histories. When climate shocks hit, droughts, floods, new pests and diseases, it is these women and their children who suffer the most. They are the first to reduce their food, pull children out of school, or take on heavy informal work to survive. We believe that if we truly want resilient food systems, we must move women from the margins to the center of agricultural transformation.
Queens of the Farm – Her Farm, Her Story: To respond to this reality, we created an groups called “Queens of the Farm” – part of our broader Her Farm, Her Story journey. Instead of leaving women isolated on small, insecure plots, we: Organise them into registered groups called Queens of the Farm, Help them rent and cultivate collective land together, Serve them through MazaoHub Farmer Excellence Centers (FECs). At these centers and through our field teams, we: Capture their farming data in our ERP and digital tools, Provide close, climate-smart agronomy support throughout the season, Help them sell their produce through more reliable, structured markets. Their income is then saved and managed as a group safety net that can grow over time giving them the financial strength to invest in new opportunities or start additional businesses together. Many of these women had never before seen their work recorded, valued or translated into data that could open doors. Through Queens of the Farm, they become visible, organised and data-backed economic actors. In simple terms: We organise women. We give them land stability. We equip them with climate-smart agronomy. We connect them to markets and finance. We protect their rights and amplify their stories. From Morogoro to Manyara and Mbeya, we are building a future where women are not just working the land they are owning their stories, their income, and their power.
