Women by Women 25, ActionAid

Posted by Verity on October 13, 2025 in Aid, climate change, Development, Environment, Exhibition, Global South, Human rights, Living today, Women's equality issues | 2 comments

‘They have taken so much from us and given us nothing in return.’ Obaro, Niger Delta

This is pretty much a constant motif in ActionAid’s exhibition of photographs by four women photographers in four locations across the globe where women are having to fight for the environment that sustains their families: Brazil, Cambodia, Nepal and Nigeria.  (ActionAid is committed to ‘amplifying the voices that have too often been ignored, silenced or misrepresented’, focusing on work with women and girls.)

In Brazil Nay Jinknss has documented the lives of the coconut-breaking women. The babassu palm tree has enabled Antônia to make and sell coconut products to support her family and send all six of her children to school. Although the trees grow in communal forests managed by the Brazilian government, the land is being encroached on by private landowners who cut down the palms. This is why women community leaders founders founded the Association of Woman Coconut Breakers, which campaigns for better protection of the forests and puts pressure on the government to enforce environmental legislation.

Neak Sophia has focused on the struggles of women in Koh Kong province in Cambodia to defend their land rights. Of the fifty freshwater ponds that provided these communities with food and drinking water, only one remains – powerful landowners have taken the others one by one, filled them in and sold the land for private property. Yung Chin is on the local committee of ActionAid’s Women-led Alternatives to Climate Change and has successfully won back land seized by a local landowner.

When the Tharu people in Nepal were released from the exploitative Kamaiya system of bonded labour, they might have expected their circumstances to improve. Not so. ‘The government provided us with land without having knowledge of the actual land geography,’ explains Krishni Tharu. Their land proved to be liable to flooding and other extreme weather conditions, meaning it is well-nigh impossible to make a living from it. Uma Bista, a photographer from Kathmandu, has captured the strength and solidarity shared by women involved in local collectives that provide training and enable to them to mobilise against threats to their land rights.

In Nigeria, Mama Obaro (her hands can be seen above) recalls the time before the oil company arrived: ‘We drank from the river and bathed in its water, and life in my community was simply beautiful.’ Now the soil and water have been so comprehensively contaminated from oil spills that crops are poor and the fish have died.

Etinosa Yvonne is a self-taught photographer who has highlighted the plight of Obaro and other women, such as Faith, a farmer in the Niger Delta. ‘This spillage has plunged us into poverty… We find it difficult to eat three square meals a day, let alone make enough money to send our children to school…Girls are forced to stay home, and while out of school they are vulnerable to abusers who prey on the fact they are hungry.’

This powerful exhibition was only on for a few days at the Oxo tower in London, but many of the images from it – by turns beautiful, harsh and heartbreaking – can be seen at Visions of resistance: women fighting to save their homeland – in pictures | Global development | The Guardian