In 2021 the little known nation of The Gambia, already ravaged by climate crises, nevertheless became the 1st country in the entire world set to fully honor the Paris Agreement—it barely made a blip in the international news.

During the decade before, my country experienced mass “irregular migration” to the West. It seemed the land, the soil itself, would no longer support the people’s very survival.

By this time, the effects of climate change had already pummeled small scale communal farming, which constitutes the majority of farms in the country. In fact, about 75% of workers in the country labor in the agricultural sector, mainly as smallholder farmers in formal or sometimes informal associations called Kafos.

Women constitute a whopping 70% of the farming population and nearly all of them do not own the lands where they labor because of patriarchal systems of land ownership. The severely depleted crop yields that skyrocketed food insecurity are born of all the same climate change side effects we see here—erratic and/or insufficient rainfall, rising temperatures, the mismatch between emerging climate and crop suitability, loss of biodiversity, rising seas levels—only magnified.