Tin Yama: “Like-Minded People”

by Joy Curtis

Initiated by Noula Nano, a visionary farmer in Mahadaga, Tin Yama is a dry season farming women’s association. In Mahadaga, the morning is typically spent working on the family farmland. The afternoon however, is reserved for individual plots of land, such as those the women usually use to grow vegetables and food for meals. To enliven the experience, Nano suggested that a group of women work together, rotating the farm they work on with the day of the week. It was an immediate success.

The association itself began around 1995, when Nano noticed the women who normally gardened in the afternoon had nothing to do at that time during the dry season. Instead, these women would drink and engage in other bad habits. Nano proposed a dry season farm for women and pioneered the organization.

Nano owns the farmland being used, and women from various areas usually came because they had little or no land to work on themselves. Tin Swani, a now defunct local NGO, paid for most of the well and the first basin so the plants would have water. Nine years later, Nano is still working for this organization. Everyone receives a percentage of the harvest, though most of the crop is sold at the market. Each woman is responsible for a different item’s sale. A certain percentage is also set aside to go back into the land, reserving it for buying seeds, fuel and farm improvements. All other profits go into one account, and is saved for special needs that may arise within the group of women, such as hard times or need for medicine. In a sense, they have created their own insurance where they would otherwise have none.