The Last Hunger Season Film Series profiles family farmers in rural Kenya who face the challenge of growing enough food just to feed their families, but are now finding ways to not only feed their families but also lift themselves out of poverty. Roger Thurow‘s book, The Last Hunger Season: A Year in an African Farm Community on the Brink of Change, inspired the film series, which are being released in a series on The Chicago Council on Global Affairs YouTube channel this week as World Food Day approaches.
The series shares the voices of African smallholder farmers. It opens with a film about the global challenge the world faces to feed the growing population. The second film depicts some of the daily struggles facing one family of farmers in rural Kenya. In the remainder of the series, the focus of the films is the success of African family farmers. The series follows individuals and families as they find innovative ways to improve their crop yields, send their children to school, and chase their own dreams.
In the films, Leonida Wanyama decides to join a group of women working together to improve crop yields while also doing everything she can to send her son, Gideon, to secondary school, and her daughter, Sitawa, to primary school. Rasoa Wasike plans for the future after benefiting from training by the One Acre Fund. At the end of the film, she speaks to the benefits of family farming, “Family farming is important because it helps us to have enough for the family and also it enables us to sell that harvest of ours and then go do other things that we need to do for ourselves.”
