Increased competitiveness
Smallholder farmers in Ghana are building mutually beneficial business relationships with the private sector to enhance their access to high-end markets and increase productivity with the adoption of modern agricultural technology.
In Ghana, 100,000 smallholder farmers have been linked to out-grower businesses to obtain drought resistant seeds, fertilisers and other services to boost their maize, rice and soybean productivity. Using a value chain facilitation approach the ACDI/VOCA-implemented Agricultural Development and Value Chain Enhancement (ADVANCE) II project, is scaling up private sector investment in production and enabling farmers to increase their yields by up to 300%.
Smallholder farmers’ access to financing has been improved by ADVANCE II’s collaboration with one of the largest mobile network providers in Ghana, MTN Ghana. MTN helps farmers to set up basic transaction accounts on their mobile phones and trains them how to use the mobile banking service to store, send and receive money. According to Doris Amponsaa Owusu, Project Business Services Specialist for ADVANCE II, “Mobile money has served as a means of saving, especially for the women, who are socially not allowed to own assets. Once their money is on their phone, unless they tell somebody, no one would ever know they had money on their phone”. ADVANCE II, a USAID Feed the Future initiative, has connected over 3,000 subscribers to mobile banking and plans to scale this out to 10,000 smallholder farmers by 2018.
In December 2016, the ADVANCE II Chief of Party signed a memorandum of understanding with Mrs Freda Duplan, Managing Director of Nestlé Ghana Ltd. The partnership will help ADVANCE II extend their work linking smallholder farmers to industrial output markets, as well as financial institutions and input businesses.
