Our Stories, One Journey: Empowering Rural Women in Asia

The Women’s Travelling Journal with the tagline Our Stories, One Journey: Empowering Rural Women in Asia is a travelling journal which forms part of the global campaign to achieve food security through a more equitable and sustainable system of growing food. It is a project initiated by the Asian Rural Women’s Coalition (ARWC), Pesticide Action Network Asia and the Pacific (PAN AP), Oxfam’s East Asia GROW Campaign and Asia Pacific Research and Resource Center for Women (ARROW).

This one of a kind project started as The Travelling Journal, Our Stories, One Journey: Empowering Rural Women in Asia which chronicled the story of eight women from the Philippines, Cambodia, Vietnam, Malaysia, India, China and Sri Lanka. The travelling journal which is now available in print and online tells about the everyday journey of these Asian rural women as they struggle and face challenges caused by an increasingly broken system marked by high food prices and low income, land grabbing, climate change, and decreasing control over seeds. The Journal has become their story, their voices and their powerful medium for them to be heard by those who shape national and international policies

Now on its second year, the project has given birth to two more travelling journals- that on Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights by 17 rural women in Southeast & East Asia (Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, Mongolia), South Asia (India, Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Pakistan), and Africa (Senegal, Mali, Benin) and the third, which is currently ongoing, that on Food Sovereignty by 45 women in seven countries in Asia.

The Women’s travelling journal has taken on Asia and the Pacific and Africa. With the ever-growing and ever-strengthening rural women’s solidarity alongside their struggles, it is not impossible that this journal will take on the whole world tomorrow and so will rural women’s stories and journeys.