The need has come for investors, policymakers and philanthropists to help alleviate poverty from rural women by investing in them to venture into mechanised agriculture, the Director of the National Sports Authority, Professor Peter Twumasi, has observed.

He said research had shown that more than 50 per cent of women in rural communities across the country were into small-scale farming, and hence needed to scale up their farms through today’s technological advancements.

“These are women who are already into farming. All they need is for people to come to their farming communities to invest, introduce them to new ways of farming so they can be fully enrolled in mechanised farming,” he explained.

He said once those industrial farms were ready, the many youth who abandon their communities and migrate to the cities to seek for non-existent jobs would revise their decision and come back home since permanent jobs would be awaiting them at their own back yard.

Prof. Twumasi was speaking at a durbar held at Abodease in the Ahafo Ano South West District in the Ahafo Region in commemoration of this year’s International Day of Rural Women marked on every October 15.

It was held on the theme: “Rural Women - Cultivating Good Food for All”.

International Day of Rural Women underscores the need for gender equality, empowerment and improved living conditions for rural women as they are essential for sustainable development and the eradication of poverty in rural areas.

Some industry experts, who were present at the event, empowered the women through the making of detergent for domestic use; making of hand gel and local soap (Alata Samina).

A team of experts from the Komfo Anokye Teaching Hospital in Kumasi took the participants through free health screening and again schooled them on the precautionary measures they needed to do to avoid breast cancer and its related diseases.

Some of the main concerns of the people were the deplorable road network, as well as the lack of electricity in the town, and appealed to the government to come to their aid, since it had adversely affected economic activities in the farming community.