African rural women play a critical role in evolving and maintaining the continent’s diverse and climate-resilient agricultural systems but their knowledge and status is increasingly being undermined. This is the message of a new report published by the African Biodiversity Network, Gaia Foundation and African Women's Development Fund to celebrate the important work of women as custodians of seed and nutritional food, medicine and biodiversity, and as spiritual, cultural and community leaders. “Today in Africa, it is small farmers - who are mainly women - who still produce 80% of the food on just 14.7% of the agricultural land, despite growing pressures,” says Liz Hosken, Founding Director of The Gaia Foundation and lead author of the report. According to the authors, the present global corporate scramble to control Africa’s rich heritage of minerals and fossil fuels, water and agricultural lands, seeds and food systems threatens to destabilise the continent and create more conflict, with women suffering most. The report puts a special focus on womens’ remarkable relationship with seed. “At the heart of this relationship between Africa’s women farmers and seed is a legacy of traditional knowledge that we cannot afford to lose. It is a legacy that has been and continues to be undermined by issues including land grabbing and disempowering seed ‘harmonisation’ laws,” writes Theo Sowa, Chief Executive of the African Women's Development Fund, in a foreword to the report. Many decades of targeting men for commercial interests promoting cash crops for foreign markets has further side-lined women, who have become increasingly invisible despite their critical role in meeting the diverse nutritional, medicinal and cultural needs of the family and the community, she warned. The report calls for both practical and policy support for rural women, their communities and their social movements in Africa, and for a profound and urgent shift in agricultural and investment policies across the continent. In particular, policies and practices should enhance women’s participation; value and recognise women’s knowledge; and enable women as well as men farmers to participate in decision-making processes in agriculture, food production, land and governance. (ab)