Nawaya

Flowers are more than beauty in the field, they are a living part of resilient farming systems.
In agroecology, flowering plants help build a “food forest” that supports biodiversity, strengthens ecosystems, and protects crops naturally.

They play a key role in natural pest management by attracting beneficial insects like ladybugs, lacewings, and parasitic wasps, all of which help control harmful pests such as aphids and caterpillars, reducing the need for chemical pesticides.
Flowers also support pollinators like bees, butterflies, and birds by providing nectar and pollen, which directly improves pollination, crop yield, and seed production.

By increasing insect diversity, flowering plants create a more balanced and stable ecosystem, one that is more resilient to environmental stress and climate change.
At the heart of it, flowers are not just part of the farm, they are part of its defense, its balance, and its future.

On Mother’s Day, we’d like to share the story of Ghada, one of the mothers in the Nawaya Community Kitchen.

The kitchen team first came together through a series of awareness videos about nutrition, shared with women from villages in El-Badrashin. Later on, some of these women began hosting small screenings in different villages, helping raise awareness about nutrition and rural food heritage.

Ghada was one of the women who attended these screenings. She started applying what she learned at home, especially with her children. At the time, her young daughter was suffering from rheumatism and was receiving regular penicillin injections, with doctors expecting this to continue until she turned 18.

But as Ghada gradually changed the family’s eating habits, her daughter’s health began to improve. Within two years, she was able to stop the injections, and her condition became much better, before she turned 16!

A mother is the foundation of a family’s nutrition—and sometimes, all she needs is the right knowledge to make a life-changing difference.

Happy Mother’s Day to every mother making a difference, one meal at a time 💛

At Nawaya, for international women’s day, we celebrate the role of women at the heart of our food systems, nurturing and nourishing local communities all over the world.

Preserving and sharing traditional knowledge, recipes, seeds and breeds, women’s role is undeniable to keep the community spirit, to save our heritage, identity and culture. When women have rights and a real say in what should be produced and how it will be distributed, women will always put their communities first.

In a world constantly divided by wars and a fight over local resources - we keep hope for a future where women have a say in food system governance. We continue to support the women of our community kitchen as a seed to grow more solidarity, more sustainability, more dignity to rural villages and a future for next generations where they inherit a food system that is healthy, local and biodiverse; That is full of opportunity.

Happy Women’s Day to every woman reading this. We see you, we appreciate you, and we’re proud of ourselves too — women showing up every day still choosing to care, to build community and to give us hope for a future that sustains life.