Voice of Change: Championing seed saving

Seeds carry more than the next harvest - they carry a community's accumulated knowledge of what grows, what survives, and what feeds a family through a hard season. Judy Kipkenda's story follows a community-based seed-saving collective working to keep that knowledge, and those seeds, in the hands of the people who depend on them.

Rooted in agroecology, the collective's work is simple in principle and powerful in practice: save seed from each harvest, share it within the community, and keep varieties alive that are suited to local soil and a changing climate - rather than relying on seed that has to be bought fresh every season. For Judy's hunter-gatherer community, that independence is a direct investment in future livelihoods, built one shared seed packet at a time.

This story is one of seven told by community champions themselves, part of Voices for Change - a partnership between the CGIAR Initiative on Climate Resilience (ClimBeR) and CEMIRIDE exploring how indigenous knowledge and rights-based approaches are already building climate resilience across Kenya's minority and indigenous communities.