Women farmers grow, buy, sell, cook food and feed their children. They produce 60 – 80%1 of food in most developing countries and, as such, it is women that hold the key to tackling hunger and malnutrition. Yet their needs are often not recognised or understood. As a result, policy interventions aimed at addressing food insecurity in rural areas often fail to reach them or have limited impact on their lives. In this report – Women Marginal Farmers Speak Out – we draw on our own research undertaken mainly in Western Province, Zambia, as well as our experience of working with rural communities in Zambia, to highlight the crucial role that women play as growers and producers of food, the myriad challenges they face in doing this, and the failure of policy interventions to acknowledge these constraints and to meet their needs effectively. By talking to women marginal farmers and other key respondents, we found that many of the interventions designed to help communities to become more food secure, such as farm technology, extension services and nutrition programmes are failing to take into account women’s multiple roles and the specific constraints they face and often do not reach them.