Naning Suprawati is the eldest daughter in a family of farmers and while she never argued with her father, she had always known that she wanted something different than the two options her father laid out for her.

Suprawati went on to major in education in university but when she started her first teaching job, life in the classroom felt suffocating. She returned to her hometown in Blitar, East Java but didn’t give up on the idea of teaching. ‘I believe I can still be a teacher, even without a classroom’, she said.

In 2009, she joined the Indonesian Farmers Alliance (API) to improve the capacity-building support provided to farmers and their families.