Empowering Ghana's Smallholder Farmers - How Farmerline's workshops are boosting yields and increasing incomes of farmers

Empowering Ghana's Smallholder Farmers - How Farmerline's workshops are boosting yields and increasing incomes of farmers

In spite of abundant modern technologies and ICTs available for use in increasing information access and agricultural productivity, most Ghanaian smallholder farmers who constitute the majority in the agricultural sector do not have access to these new innovations. The result has been a failure to produce enough food for the nation and improving the lives of farmers.

For Schandorf Adu Bright, Director of Farmer Services at Farmerline, the marked deterioration in the performance of Ghana’s agriculture is partly because of the lack of access to timely and relevant agricultural advisory information.

"Most farmers simply don't have access to new innovations,” Schandorf says. “And that is a problem because adopting these modern technologies is the first step towards increasing their production.”

In an effort to overcome these issues, Farmerline organizes workshops and training as a strategy to provide smallholder farmers with timely and locally relevant agricultural advisory information which will directly improve their yield and increase their income.

Patrick Sakyi, Monitoring and Evaluation Associate at Farmerline, acknowledges that goal behind these workshops is to create awareness, bring innovative ICTs and services to users and potential users.

"These workshops allows us to educate farmers on our services that will in the end help them know about weather patterns, have access to market prices, reduce wastage after harvest" he says.

By using existing institutional structures, the farmer Services team of Farmerline is able to organize 6 to 8 workshops per week. During the period of March – October, 2016, the Farmer Services team reached over 3,800 smallholder farmers through workshops conducted in 102 communities in the Ashanti, Western, Brong Ahafo and the Northern Regions of Ghana.

Majority of the farmers we engaged had simple phones. We will continue to develop mobile technologies that enhances information access for smallholders to improve decision making and sustainable farming methods.

 

This news item is part of a Partner Spotlight on Farmerline (4-11 November). Each week, the GFAR Secretariat is turning the spotlight on the work and collective actions of Partners in GFAR who share in our mission to strengthen and transform agri-food research and innovation systems globally. For more information on the Partners in GFAR, and to become a Partner, click here!