More-than-human Farming: Cooperatives, climate shocks and digital adaptation in Rwanda’s agrarian economy

Overview

Rwanda remains a predominantly agrarian economy, with the majority of the population relying on rain-fed farming for livelihoods. This reliance makes rural communities particularly vulnerable to climate shocks such as heavy rains, floods, droughts, and pest outbreaks, which disrupt production and markets in significant and uneven ways. Women and youth farmers are disproportionately affected, facing barriers to land access, credit, and technical know-how, while carrying additional care burdens that constrain their adaptive capacity. Drawing on field-level interview data from six cooperatives engaged in coffee, poultry, horticulture, and staple crop farming, this article explores how collective structures and emerging digital solutions are shaping climate resilience in Rwanda with a focus on climate change adaptation for women and youth. Cooperatives provide critical forms of mutual support, pooling resources, distributing inputs, experimenting with soil conservation, and sharing climate information through radio, mobile alerts, and training. These strategies help mitigate shocks but also reveal persistent inequalities in who accesses, benefits from, and influences adaptation pathways. Guided by feminist new materialist perspectives, we understand Rwandan farmer cooperatives as more-than-human assemblages where rain, soil, terrain, seeds, digital apps, and gendered bodies intra-act to shape adaptation possibilities. Climate events emerge not as external impacts but as active participants in these assemblages, reconfiguring what is possible for farmers in specific times and places. In this framing, resilience is relational: co-produced by human actors, non-human forces, and technologies, all embedded in unequal social and institutional structures.