My Community: For my future let me learn from Aquatic Agricultural Systems on Vimeo.
Every year during the wet season the swollen Zambezi River bursts its banks, destroying homes and crops, flooding classrooms, and displacing communities across the Barotse Floodplain in Zambia.
For 13-year-old Ilinanga Mulonda and thousands like her, this means their education is put on hold – for some permanently – while the floodwater inundates their classrooms, and their parents struggle to pay for school fees.
Many depend on fish during these difficult months and a shortage means that children go hungry, parents lose their income, and some turn to prostitution in desperation.
A part of the My Community series, this film provides a unique insight in to the lives of rural women living in the Barotse Floodplain, an aquatic agricultural system in Zambia.
My Community
The My Community series provides a unique insight into the lives of people living on the edge between water and land.
Coastal zones, river deltas and floodplains are home to over 700 million people worldwide, many of whom are poor, and depend on fishing and farming to support their families.
My Community is a selection of short films commissioned by the CGIAR Research Program on Aquatic Agricultural Systems that gives a voice to these communities as they tell their stories for the first time.
The Program aims to reduce poverty and improve food security for 50 million people living in aquatic agricultural systems throughout Africa, Asia and the Pacific.