By Stevelee Mwichigi, Womens Empowerment and Advocacy Coordinator at AGRA

A letter to my brothers.

There is a particular look I get when I tell other men what I do for a living. It’s not hostility entirely, something closer to mild confusion edged with pity. Wait, what did you say? That’s your thing? Women’s stuff? Nobody says it out loud, but they don’t need to.

There is a cost to being a man in this space that doesn’t show up in any program budget. The jokes that are mostly jokes. The quiet and persistent suggestion that caring this much about women’s economic power is somehow, off. Less serious than the real work in policy, seed systems, sustainable land management. I have sat with that suggestion more times than I can count since getting into this advocacy.

And there are harder moments than the jokes. Moments where I am in a room of men, even my own colleagues, and I am making the case (probably for the millionth time) for why women’s transformation has to sit at the center of this work and not get buried somewhere in Annex 69. And I feel a cooling and undeniable shift in the room. The sense that I have said something that places me on the wrong side of an invisible line. That when a man argues this hard for women, other men read it as a kind of defection and others even yet, a suspicion that would place me on the accusing side of the African culture. Oh boy have I felt that, I won’t pretend I haven’t.

But then I go home.

To a daughter who is figuring out what the world thinks of her and what it is actually willing to offer her. Those are not the same thing (at least not yet). And something about quietly watching that process daily makes the discomfort in those rooms feel like a very small price.

I am a father, a husband, a brother. The women in my life are not my motivation in some abstract, poster-quote sense. They are the reason this stopped being just a job some time ago. When I am sitting in a meeting arguing about whether a program is genuinely transformative or just gender-responsive enough to tick a box, I am thinking about my daughter. I am thinking about whether the world she walks into will make her prove herself before it takes her seriously. Whether her ambition will be called impressive but not quite fundable, and whether the ceiling will just be higher, or actually gone.

And you know what, I am not willing to shrug at that.

And that is where I keep arriving, no matter how many programs I support to design or reviews I sit through, what would happen if more men refused to shrug? And listen, not just men who work in this space, but literally any man. What if the minister who signs off on the agricultural budget, the banker who approves the lending product, the donor who greenlights the program, the cooperative chairman, the husband, the father, what if each of them decided that unless an initiative puts women’s transformation at its center, not a token inclusion, not responsiveness, not a gender paragraph on page 47 – he simply will not put his name to it. Will not champion it or bother showing up for it. Not as a favour but as a line he has made a commitment never to cross.

The agrifood sector has spent years trying to bring men along. Campaigns, coalitions, male champion frameworks, and, quite honestly, in some shape or form, I have been part of one or two of them. Please don’t get me wrong, they do matter. But there is a difference between a man who has been persuaded and a man who has decided.

Persuasion is fragile and bends under pressure, or under peer eyes or under the next room full of men giving you that look. Conviction is something else. It is the thing that makes you stay in the argument even when it costs you something.

I can’t make that choice for anyone else. I can only say it is the choice I keep making, yet not without the occasional moment of wondering if it is worth it. But every time I see my baby Lael’s face light up when I walk into the room, I have this undeniable conviction that I can’t fail her. Bro, she’s only eight years old, so she doesn’t know yet that she’s the reason.

This International Women’s Month, that is the only thing I want to put on the table. A standard for my sons and for you, my brother and an honest invitation to hold it with me.

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