In April 2011, ActionAid Australia launched a nationwide search for an Aussie woman to become our Hunger Busting Blogger.

The winner was promised the trip of a lifetime with ActionAid to Tanzania in July to attend a two week blogger training course along with 15 other food rights activists from Africa, Asia, Europe and Latin America.

But there was a catch. You had to be a woman with “a connection to the land”.

We weren’t interested in blogging experts as such, just women with an open mind who were passionate about fighting the root causes of poverty, and empowering rural women to fight for their rights.

Over the six week nomination process, 41 amazing Aussie women nominated themselves to be an ActionAid Hunger Busting Blogger.  Applicants ranged from rural farmers and agricultural students to city farmers working on small plots around the country.

ActionAid then produced a shortlist of 19 nominees and asked them to submit videos explaining how they’d spread the word about sustainable agriculture and the role of women farmers in busting hunger around the world. Check out the shortlist and their videos.

The videos revealed a diverse group of inspiring and passionate women. But there could only be one winner… or so we thought.

In the end we couldn’t narrow the field down to just one of our shortlisted nominees. The quality of entries was just too high. So, we chose two – Hannah Moloney and Tina McPherson.

Hannah is a 27 year-old city farmer and ever-curious permaculturalist. With a post-graduate degree in Community Cultural Development, Hannah has spent the last few years teaching permaculture and small-scale organics around Australia. She is currently working with Cultivating Community in Melbourne as a Community Food Systems Officer and co-manages a number of community gardens on housing estates.

Tina is an effervescent strawberry and passionfruit farmer from Bundaberg, Queensland. The mother of four describes her passion for sustainable agriculture as her “everyday”. In her own words: “It is how I feed the children, it is my each and every work day, it is where we play as a family, it is where I interact with my staff, it is where I go to relax and reflect, it is all around me.”

Together, Tina and Hannah will travel to Tanzania for two weeks of blogger training, followed by a four day visit to Uganda to meet with a smallholder farming community ActionAid Uganda has been working with for a number of years.

When they return to Australia, Tina and Hannah will spend the next 12 months blogging about their experiences and raising awareness of sustainable agriculture and the role of women in fixing the world’s broken food system.

To back them up, ActionAid chose two runners up – Shae Spry from Melbourne and Elizabeth Ashmore from Armidale (you can read their impressive nominations and supporting comments on the Hunger Busting Blogger nominations post).

ActionAid’s sincerest thanks go to the 41 inspiring women who applied for this role, the 200-plus people who supported them through comments and the thousands of people who have been following closely on the blog, Facebook and Twitter, for being part of the Hunger Busting Blogger competition.

You can follow ActionAid on Twitter and Facebook for updates on Tina and Hannah’s adventures in Africa and their reflections over the next 12 months on what sustainable and just agriculture really means.

For more information on ActionAid, visit www.actionaid.org.au and get in touch!