Help for Upper East Smallholder farmers to prosper

The Agricultural Development and Value Chain Enhancement (ADVANCE) project, has presented 254 radio sets to smallholder farmers in the Upper East Region for information on new agricultural technology towards increasing food security.

Speaking to the Ghana News Agency at Kazigu in the Kassena-Nankana West District, the Monitoring and Evaluation Officer of ADVANCE, Mr Victor Tetteh Agbagbla, said a total of 900 radio sets with solar panels had been distributed to nuclear farmers in the Northern, Upper East, Upper West, and Brong Ahafo Regions.

The sets would enable smallholder farmers to listen to programmes from the selected radio stations.

The ADVANCE project has gone into partnership with the selected radio stations to provide new farming technology and education to farmers with resource persons.

The farmers have the opportunity to phone in to ask questions on how to improve upon the yield of crops such as maize, millet, rice and beans.

He stated that his outfit had played facilitation roles by ensuring that the farmers had access to farm inputs, loans, and the marketing of their produce.

On land preparation, he explained that whilst ADVANCE contributed about 70 per cent of the cost in areas like tractor services, the beneficiaries were made to contribute 30 per cent towards the activity.

He said that the project in 2014 supported about 6,800 farmers in its operational areas.

In the second phase, about 23,000 smallholder farmers from the project implementation area were being supported with 9,000 of them coming from the Upper East Region.

He said since the inception of the programme, many smallholder farmers had either doubled or tripled their yields leading to food increase in households.

The goal of ADVANCE is to facilitate the transformation of Northern Ghana’s agricultural sector in maize, rice, and soybean production to achieve a greater degree of food security among the rural population in the North, while increasing competitiveness in the domestic markets.

The project contributes directly to achieving FTF’s objectives of reducing poverty and hunger through inclusive agricultural growth and improved nutrition.

It adopts a value-chain approach where smallholder farmers are linked to markets, finance, inputs, equipment, and information through larger commercial farmers and traders who have the capacity to invest in these chains.

It is built upon the ability of smallholder farmers to increase the efficiency of their farm businesses with improved production and post-harvest handling practices.

The practices include improved seed varieties, access to quality inputs, mechanization, and market access.