THREE districts in the Brong Ahafo Region and the three northern regions have been selected to benefit from a programme dubbed “Northern Rural Growth Programme (NRGP).”
The Brong Ahafo districts are Tain, Pru and Sene, and the northern regions — Northern, Upper East and Upper West.
The three northern regions are considered to be poor in terms of all socio-economic indicators and as such the decision by the government to implement the programme there is quite laudable.
The Brong Ahafo Region, however, has been drawn into it by virtue of the wide range of its agro-ecological zones.
The vegetation of the region comprises 25 per cent of forest, 11 per cent semi-deciduous forest and as high as 64 per cent savannah. This provides the region some level of diversity in the utilisation of agricultural resources.
Additionally, the Brong Ahafo Region has a fair rainfall distribution, fertile soils and a high farming population of approximately 70 per cent.
The overall goal of the programme is to achieve sustainable agriculture and food security for the rural poor and improved rural livelihoods in northern Ghana and the northern parts of the Brong Ahafo Region.
It also aims at developing agricultural commodity value chains and increasing agricultural production.
It will help vulnerable groups, including women and the youth, to create profitable commodity and food value chains and in addition, help improve market linkages with domestic and export markets for agricultural production.
The NRGP is highly demand-driven and private sector-led and adopts a value chain approach for developing agriculture in the beneficiary districts.
Nearly 45,000 households will directly benefit from a comprehensive intervention, including strengthening of producer organisations, infrastructure improvement, such as roads, irrigation schemes and improved access to agricultural production, processing and marketing funding.
The project, which will run for eight years, is under the auspices of the Ministry of Food and Agriculture (MOFA) and is jointly funded by the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) and the African Development Bank (AfDB) at a total cost of US$103.55 million.
IFAD is advancing US$22.33 million and the grant of US$0.40 with the AfDB will offer a loan of US$61.22 million
IFAD formulated the programme in 2006 following a request from the Government of Ghana (GoG), and subsequently appraised it in July 2007 after which the government requested the AfDB to co-finance the project with IFAD.
This is to help achieve wider geographical coverage and increase agriculture-related infrastructure such as irrigation schemes and rural roads.
The NRGP is consistent with the Ghana Growth and Poverty Reduction Strategy (GPRS II) and Food and Agriculture Sector Development Policy II, which now constitutes the framework for donors’ support to the development of the agriculture sector.
The project is strongly market and productivity oriented, private sector-led, involving farmers, traders, processors, exporters, service providers and banks and it will provide an incentive framework for private firms to do agricultural business in the north and supply linkages, have multi-stakeholder dialogue and public private partnerships, build sustainable private institutions, as well as bring in innovation and flexibility.
“We don’t want the north to export poverty to the south as it has been the case all the time but we want the north to export quality agricultural produce down south. If we provide them with proper things they won’t be nuisances anywhere,” the National Programme Co-ordinator, Mr Roy Ayariga, observed. The programme has four different aligned components. The first is the commodity chain development, under which producer organisations would be strengthened, establishment of Inter-Professional bodies, preparation and implementation of results-based commodity business plans, as well as the development of a commodity fund. This will be followed by the rural infrastructure development component which will involve small-scale irrigation development such as dams, river-pumping machines and underground abstractions to irrigate at least 4,500 hectares. Under this component also will be the development of marketing infrastructure, which will involve 800 kilometres of farm tracks and 600 kilometres of feeder roads, 270 culverts, upgrading of 348 kilometres of trunk roads, construction of 10 bridges while farmers will be assisted to acquire group transport and storage/bulk facilities. The remaining two components are access to financial service and programme co-ordination.
Planned under the project are four commodity windows to be pursued including industrial crops such as Soybean, groundnut and brewery sorghum.
Women crops such as shea-nut, moringa, African rice sesame, export horticulture such as okra, chilly, French bean, Asian vegetables and papaya; and an animal-based window such as guinea fowl production, fish farming and small ruminants and pigs rearing.
About 372,000 rural households or three million people living in these households out of 1.56 million who are women will directly benefit from the programme with improved rural infrastructure and water facilities, improved access to financial services and increased agriculture production, processing and marketing.
This is expected to lead to an increase in incomes and household food security, as well as improved living standards.
The programme was officially launched in all the participation regions. In the Brong Ahafo Region, the ceremony took place at Kintampo and was well attended by farmers, chiefs, district chief executives, district co-ordinating directors, staff of the Ministry of Food and Agriculture (MOFA), and Presiding Members, among other dignitaries.
The National Co-ordinator of the programme, Mr Ayariga, said a strong linkage between industries and agriculture was the key to poverty reduction and wealth creation, especially among the rural poor in Ghana in general and the Northern Savanna area in particular.
According to him, farmers got poorer when the cost of production far exceeded the revenues from their produce, mainly due to poor market, and attributed poor prices of local agricultural produce to cheap imports and farmers’ lack of knowledge of the requirements of the markets, both in terms of quality standards and the marketable varieties.
He explained that the NRGP sought to establish a strong linkage between producers and consumers by adopting the commodity value chain approach to agri-business.
The Project Co-ordinator pointed out that with the rising of global food crises, local producers were now in an advantageous position because it was cheaper for importers of various agricultural commodities to look in the country to purchase those commodities and that past interventions had always been skewed towards increasing yields and the introduction of new varieties.
That is why, he said, under the NRGP, farmers’ knowledge of market requirements and strengthening of the entire linkage between the market and the farmer, was the central focus.
The Deputy Brong Ahafo Regional Minister, Mr Eric Opoku, who launched the programme, said the current global dispensation had engendered a process where co-operate economic power concentrated in value addition and set quality standards to meet the demands of the global competitive market.
He stressed that production and distribution of goods and services had become smaller in the global village while the supply chain flowed freely across national boarders.
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