Before It's Forgotten: Archiving the Climate Wisdom of Rural Grandmothers

In the villages I work with across Malawi, there are women in their 70s and 80s who can tell you exactly when to plant before the rains shift, which seeds survive a failed season, how to read the sky, the soil, the wind knowledge passed down for generations, refined through decades of living directly off the land.

None of it is written down anywhere.

We talk constantly about climate adaptation as something communities need to be taught. But in the rural communities I work with, adaptation knowledge already exists it's just aging out with the women who hold it, unrecorded and untranslated into the spaces where climate decisions actually get made.

I want to start an initiative to change that: a Climate Knowledge Archive, built by sitting with elder women in rural Malawi and recording their knowledge planting cycles, seed-saving practices, water conservation methods, drought indicators in their own words, in their own languages. Not to extract it and hand it to researchers, but to feed it directly back into local adaptation planning and regional climate policy, with the women themselves credited as the experts they are.

This is personal for me. Every time I've sat with a grandmother in one of our communities and listened to what she knows, I've thought: the world calls this "indigenous knowledge" in policy papers, but here, it's just what she knows because she's lived it and it deserves to shape decisions, not just be quoted in them.

I'm looking to connect with:

• Women with experience in oral history or community archiving

• Anyone who's worked on indigenous knowledge documentation in a climate context

• Potential partners or funders who see the same gap I do

If this resonates with your own community's experience, or you've seen something similar work elsewhere, I'd love to hear from you.