Ghana

Context

Between 1990 and 2007 Ghana nearly halved the number of its citizens living in extreme poverty. Despite these significant improvements, some 30% of Ghanaians still live on less than $1.25/day and two million have limited access to food. Children are especially vulnerable. Approximately 12% of Ghana’s children under the age of five are currently underweight while 25% of children in the Upper West Region, where Groundswell partner CIKOD works, are underweight. Also, due to the ongoing global economic crisis, poverty has recently deepened for many, especially women, farmers, and people living in the Upper West and two other northern provinces.

In the short term Ghana has been fairly successful in minimizing the impact of the global food crisis by means of social support programs and through measures such as the removal of import duties and taxes on food and fuel. Nevertheless, continued increases in staple food prices and other macroeconomic challenges, including high inflation, significant deficits, and a growing debt load (due in part to high public sector spending to ease the impact of the food and fuel crises) threaten to undermine the gains Ghana has made in recent decades.

In addition to the global economic crisis, Ghana’s rural poor must overcome a mounting soil fertility crisis that is exacerbating food insecurity in the three northern regions (Upper West, Upper East, and Northern Regions). As in the rest of the Sahel, the soil problems in northern Ghana stem from many interconnected problems. Contributing factors are inappropriate farming practices, the rising price of nitrogen-based chemical fertilizer and other farm inputs, population pressure on the land leading to reduced fallowing, declining ability to support animal herds which in turn results in reduced availability of manure for soil fertility, and climate change that is altering rainfall patterns. This “perfect storm” is described in greater detail on the Mali page.

This situation is being made even worse because farmers are increasingly producing non-native, less nutritious crops that are not suited to local conditions. Past generations of farmers enjoyed food security through the production of indigenous crop varieties. These included: cereals, such as zeze and maize; legumes such as songsogli (bean); and roots and tubers, such as nanyie (potatoes), all of which store well and are resistant to local diseases and pests as well as drought.  

Groundswell’s Response

CIKOD is working to address these and other root causes of poverty in northern Ghana by strengthening traditional authorities and civil society organizations to facilitate sustainable grassroots organizational development that gives voice to the poor and vulnerable rural families. It is influencing communities, local governments as well as national policy makers and development agencies to support the scaling of agroecology as a strategy to overcome hunger. Also, CIKOD’s work on the ground seeks to improve rural families’ agricultural productivity, agro-processing for local consumption and local markets and income levels for enhanced food security through the production of native crops, such as bengpula and zokeber (legumes), kamazie (cereal), kurbara, nyuwome and nanyie (roots and tubers).

With Groundswell’s support, CIKOD is implementing a program that combines agro-ecology and women’s savings and credit activities in the Upper West Region. The initial stages of the work are focusing on exchange visits between women leaders from this region and well developed women’s saving and credit groups in Burkina Faso, with the goal of sparking a self-help movement among Ghanaian women leaders.