Ghana

The Mastercard Foundation in partnership with Agri-Impact Limited has rolled out an ambitious and transformative program dubbed Harnessing Agricultural Productivity and Prosperity for Youth (HAPPY) to be implemented by eight Implementing Partners including NewAge Agric Solutions, National Service Scheme (NSS), Ghana Cares (MiDA), Ghana Enterprises Agency (GEA), Ministry of Food and Agriculture (MOFA), TechnoServe, Catholic Relief Services (CRS) and Jobberman. 

HAPPY is built on 3 intervention areas:

Provision of Technical and Advisory Services for the monitoring and Evaluation of GEXIM funded Projects.

This was a consultancy assignment that performed the following tasks;

Agribusiness in Sustainable Natural African Plant Products (ASNAPP) was a USAID co-funded program established in 1999 to help develop the natural products sector in Africa by promoting income-generating activities for rural entrepreneurs in a way that improves the livelihoods of rural communities.  The programs included herbal teas, spices, medicinal plants and plant butters which are grown, harvested and sold by rural producers globally.

The Program was jointly developed and implemented by these organisations. The development and implementation of the program was based on the organizations’ belief that, the concerted action of forest sector actors will achieve greater impact in the promotion of sustainable forest management than any individual effort could. Under the programmatic approach, the partnership worked in three clusters namely:  Certification, Non- Timber Forest Products and Governance Clusters.

SOPMEP was a UNDP funded cross-border programme implemented in Ghana and Burkina Faso with spillovers in Niger, Mali and Benin. It was an onion productivity and market expansion programme designed to reduce poverty and improve food security in the two countries.

The agricultural vocation in the country had been declining as most of the formal institutes providing vocational training in agriculture had been converted into tertiary institutes leaving a gap for hands-on training in agricultural vocational training.

Agri-impact consult imported and installed 12 greenhouse structures, and provided services through engaging, selecting and training interested farmers in the 6 coastal districts in the Western region on the cultivation and maintaining of vegetable farms in the greenhouses.  

The €1,184,956.00 project was championed by Agri-Impact Consult (AIC) over the project period. AIC was instrumental in collecting baseline data on participating farmers for end of project evaluation, building the technical and managerial capacities of value chain actors in high value horticultural products to increase income and improve livelihoods.

The project’s implementing partners were, Research Triangle Institute (RTI), Cuttington University, University of Liberia, University of Michigan, and North Carolina State University.  ASNAPP/AIC served as the consortium lead on this project and performed various roles which included:

It is envisaged that it will help increase the volume of vegetables available and significantly close price variations due to seasonality thereby reducing agricultural contribution to inflation, and reducing import of vegetables to Ghana.

Greenhouse Production in Ghana increased from about 1ha in 2008 to about 4ha in 2015-2017 to about 23ha in 2021. Ghana EXIM (GEXIM) Bank funded Greenhouses constitute 56% of all Greenhouses in Ghana and this can reduce tomato imports by 2% using tomato import from Burkina Faso as the reference.