Tropentag 2026: Launch of the 5th Edition

In this intimate and groundbreaking film, Laissa Malih, the first female Maasai filmmaker, returns to her ancestral village in Laikipia to explore how climate change is transforming Maasai lands and lives. What begins as a documentary about land and tradition becomes a personal journey of identity, belonging and intergenerational dialogue. Through her lens, Malih reclaims the narrative of her people, offering an insider’s perspective on resilience, culture and the future of Maasai storytelling.

In the Puna region of Argentina, this film shows aspects of ecological research of high-altitude grasslands and develops the importance of establishing a respectful dialogue between scientific knowledge and local traditional knowledge of Andean people. It brings pastoralists’ perspectives on their life and livelihood system, shows the main issues they face in the arid high desert of the Puna region and reflects the role of mobility and traditional knowledge in pastoral systems.

In this film, a nomadic woman shares her daily life in Ladakh’s high mountains. She speaks about the hardships of changing rainfall, the struggle to feed her livestock, and the reasons why many young people leave for the cities—offering a poignant glimpse into a fragile way of life under pressure.

In the ten years since Ganaderas en Red (GeR) was founded, this Spanish coalition of women herders, pastoralists and livestock keepers have set an example about how to structure a network through which they can offer mutual support to each other. They now include over 200 women connecting across 30 different areas in Spain. The NGO Fundación Entretantos has facilitated processes for this network to flourish. The significance of GeR is captured in this film, in the words of GeR: “This documentary reflects who we are, our love for animals and our craft. Six years after our creation, we felt the need to convey our unity and put a face to a network of women working towards a living, fair and equal rural world.”

Byambagerel Baatar, a pastoralist woman from Mongolia and participant in the Global Gathering of Pastoralist Women in May 2026, speaks about the urgent need for visibility, recognition and rights for pastoralist women. She calls for pastoralist women’s labour to be officially recognised, for land ownership and property rights to be guaranteed, for safe environments free from violence and risk, for women to be included in decision-making, for equal access to finance and technology, and for pastoralist women to be included in climate policy.

IYRP Global Gathering: Interviews with women pastoralists and representatives of pastoralist organisations from Africa, Asia and more. Filmed before the Global Gathering of Pastoralist Women in Kathmandu, Nepal, in May 2026 explaining why the gathering is important and the expectations from it. Organisers succeeded in bringing together 100 pastoralist women from 40 countries to celebrate their leadership, strengthen solidarity across regions, identify shared priorities, and amplify pastoralist women’s voices in global discussions on rangelands and pastoralist futures.

This film was collaboratively made as part of the lead-up to the Global Gathering of Pastoralist Women together with Djoudé Issa Demo from Benin. It shows the centrality of livestock and how women pastoralists are able to use their hard work to get income and support for their families. It also addresses the difficulty of accessing markets from rural areas.

In 1984, film festival co-founder, Dr. Ann Waters-Bayer, made this film together with Asma’u Maikano whose livelihood and skilled dairy craft is featured in the documentary. The filming was done in Madauchi (Asma’u’s home) and Zonkwa (where she sold the milk) in southern Kaduna State, Nigeria. Ann chose to do all of the editing in Nigeria rather than Germany, in a village with no electricity, so that Asma’u could carefully review what footage she did not want shown, and which scenes she most wanted to feature. “Fulani Dairywoman” has been specially digitised for the 5^th edition of the Perspectives on Pastoralism Film Festival from the original Super8 film.

Many from all around the world asked for a tribute to Dr. Ann Waters-Bayer, who dedicated much of the past half century to promoting bottom-up innovation, participatory methods, and the importance of pastoralists. It was her vision to create the Perspectives on Pastoralism Film Festival as a vehicle to raise awareness about the importance of extensive livestock production and the people who make it happen. She has also been a driving force behind getting the grassroots momentum organised to put forward the proposal for the United Nations IYRP 2026. Her kindness and integrity form a positive force for change.

In 2023, Hungarian women herders joined together to create a group so that they could mutually support each other and offer more visibility for women in the herding profession. This film offers an intimate interview with the leader of this group, Ibolya Sáfiánné, along with historical photos from her life and footage of her working with some of her sheep and lambs. In the second half of the film, there is footage from the Herder-Scientist Gathering organised by Prof. Zsolt Molnár in May 2023, which brought together scientists from all over the world and herders from different parts of Hungary. Since this film was made, Hungarian women herders have become more involved in global networks.

For more information about women herders in Hungary: https://martor.muzeultaranuluiroman.ro/archive/2024-29/

Darrylin is a Jaru woman who comes from a line of strong and proud Aboriginal women. Her family has been working with cattle all of her life. She remembers being with her grandfather in cattle yards from an early age and knew that this was what she wanted to do. Today Darrylin is the only woman working on Lamboo Station, owned and run by the Ngunjiwirri Aboriginal Corporation. Her vision to offer training camps to empower local Aboriginal people earned her the title of Western Australia’s Rural Woman of the Year in 2018.

Highlights the work of three women pastoralists to lead their communities to restore rangelands, improve livelihoods and increase biodiversity. The case studies presented by these women include the Koitegan Community Forest in Kenya, the Sary-Bulak Village in the Issyk-Kul region of Kyrgyzstan, and Finca Montefrio in Cortegana, Spain. The film is made by a team from the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), which is part of the global CGIAR system for agricultural research.

In preparation for the Global Gathering of Pastoralist Women in Kathmandu in May 2026, a number of pastoralist women from all around the world were invited to collaboratively make films about issues that are important to them. Maira, from Colombia, discusses how pastoralists are not widely recognised in her country, and the work of pastoralist women is even less known. She argues that there must be more political representation of pastoralist women, not just symbolically attending meetings, but structurally integrated in decision-making. She also explains that, because of the multiple roles that women hold as mothers and caregivers, decisions they are involved in will likely increase sustainability and community wellbeing.

Sadia Musse Ahmed was interviewed as part of a series of films made at the 2019 Annual Meeting of the Coalition of European Lobbies for Eastern African Pastoralism (CELEP) that was held in Brussels, Belgium, with representatives from Europe and Eastern Africa. Sadia represented the Pastoral and Environmental Network in the Horn of Africa (PENHA). She explains the challenges women face, particularly emphasising exclusion from decision-making in pastoralist groups within Somalia.

This film takes us on a journey across several countries in Europe, introducing people whose families have practised transhumance for generations. Following the seasonal movement of livestock between different grazing areas, they continue a way of life that makes the best use of natural resources while preserving landscapes, traditions and cultural knowledge.

The film gives particular prominence to the experiences and contributions of women in transhumant communities, whose roles are essential to the continuity and transmission of this living heritage.

Filmmaker Francesca Pasetti has dedicated much of her professional life to promoting and documenting transhumance. Her work includes her long-standing involvement with the Fundación Trashumancia y Naturaleza in Spain, her role as Focal Point for the Spanish Declaration of Transhumance as UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage, and her position as Co-Chair of the European Regional IYRP Support Group of the Global Alliance for Rangelands and Pastoralists (GA4RP), among other activities.

Through the voices and experiences of transhumant pastoralists across Europe, the film highlights transhumance not simply as an agricultural practice, but as a living cultural heritage that continues to connect people, animals, landscapes and generations. It is included in a UNESCO collection dedicated to the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, recognising the cultural significance and continuing vitality of transhumance.

The community-led film project Jireen – Sharing Land, by Echi Gabbert and Ginno Ballo, will be partly shown as work-in-progress footage. They will also discuss the ongoing journey of collaborative filmmaking and project development in an agro-pastoral Arbore community in southern Ethiopia and explore what it means to protect community ownership. They will share their experience of what decolonial collaboration means in practice: not only changing language and participation, but redesigning processes when existing structures undermine equity.

This film highlights the vital but often overlooked role of women in pastoralist communities. Through local voices, it shows how including women in decision-making strengthens both gender equity and sustainable pastoral development. It also differentiates between a focus on women and a focus on gender, emphasising that gendered research requires a relational analysis between different women and men in an area. In relation to development, it cautions that sometimes projects focused on improving women’s livelihoods might have the unintended consequence of having the activity co-opted by men.

From the MOOC Pastoralism and Development IIED: https://www.iied.org/mooc-pastoralism-development-online-learning-journey