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The Ghanaian Ministry of Finance and Economic Planning has launched a financial assistance project to support more than 540,000 smallholder rural farmers across the country.
The Ghanaian Ministry of Finance and Economic Planning has launched a financial assistance project to support more than 540,000 smallholder rural farmers across the country. The International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) is funding the implementation of the Affordable Agricultural Financing for Resilient Rural Development (AAFORD) project to be implemented in the Bono, Bono East, Ahafo, Northern, Savannah, and North East Regions.
It would directly benefit about 75,000 poor rural households, and indirectly to about 465,000 individuals in smallholder households to support food security and improve the living standards of smallholder farmers.
The Minister of State of Finance and Economic Planning. Dr. Mohammed Amin Adam while launching the project highlighted the contributions of the agriculture sector to national development and export, the sector contributes 40 % to Ghana’s export earnings and significant source of inputs for the manufacturing industry, with two-thirds of non-oil manufacturing depending on agriculture for raw materials, while at the same time providing over 90 % of the food needs of the country. According to the Third Ghana Economic Update 2020 by the World Bank, around 71 % of formal employment in rural areas is in the farming sector, indicating the importance of increasing agrarian incomes as a means of lowering rural poverty.
The Minister said agribusiness had a very high multiplier effect on employment, creating over 750 jobs for every additional $1 million of output as indicated by the Ghana Economic Update 2018. Yet, the agricultural growth was affected by low productivity and competitiveness, saying rain-fed agriculture was practiced in around 96 % of the farming area, informal private small-scale irrigation was prevalent in three per cent of the area and formal irrigation covered 0.4 % of the agricultural lands.
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Laskshmi Moola, the Country Director of IFAD stated that the implementation of the AAFORD would greatly help Ghana achieve the objectives of the second phase of the government’s PfFJs recently launched by President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo. She called for support from everybody so that the project’s implementation would be successful and achieve desirable outcomes.
