Recently, Ghana affirmed her commitment to banishing hunger as the President of the Republic of Ghana, HE Nana Addo Dankwa Akuffo-Addo launched the national Zero Hunger Strategic Review (ZHSR).The comprehensive national report and road map which is expected to inform national efforts to achieve zero hunger by 2030 was applauded by many social commentators as a commendable feat in efforts to realizing Sustainable Development Goal 2.
Prepared under the supervision of the Ministry of Planning, the report establishes the current state of hunger in the country and offers tangible possibilities available to help reverse the situation.
In his address at the launch, which was organized by the John A. Kufuor Foundation and the World Food Programme, President Akufo-Addo submitted that Ghana had excelled in her attempts to stop hunger in its tracks.
“Indeed, we were the first country on the African continent to attain the Millennium Development Goal No. 1 of halving poverty and hunger, for which the country received an award ‘for reducing the level of its malnourished population from 7 million in the early 1990s to less than 1 million today’”, he asserted.

In this piece, I present you key excerpts from chapter 4 of the report which reflects ‘Priority Actions and Key Findings’ from the report. Read on.

OVERVIEW

Ending hunger and malnutrition cannot be achieved without critically improving on the agricultural sector in all spheres as well as harnessing the efforts of all sectors of government that directly or indirectly affect food production from farm to table in both quantity and quality. Having enough food must however be coupled with nutrition education and behaviour change communications for zero hunger and malnutrition to be achieved. People must be able to make healthy food choices and apply preparation methods that will conserve nutrients.
It is a fact that if Ghana must end hunger, food security and malnutrition in all its form by 2030 the people to target are small scale farmers, the poor in both rural and urban areas, rural woman, people living under severe environmental conditions, the disabled and the aged. However for food value chains to function so that value can be added to the pro-aggregators, food processers, marketers, financiers and others to facilitate the production, processing, marketing and consumption processes.

SDG TARGET: END HUNGER

To end hunger by 2030 the following priority actions are recommended by the report:
1) Poverty eradication (SDG 1) is critical for ending hunger, but SDG 2 will be very important for the eradication of poverty especially in rural areas and the reduction of north-south, rural-urban and female-male inequalities national statistics indicate that there has been significant poverty reduction nation-wide yet in the rural and peri-urban communities all groups interviewed felt poverty and hunger had increased over time. That clearly indicates a widening rural-urban inequality and hunger gap. Government has to show greater commitment to SDG 2 targets in terms of provision of resources to support actions being suggested here. If government does not show commitment by action, development partners will be lukewarm in their support.

2) Small-holder farmers are largely the poor and their poverty arises mainly from lack of markets as well as the low prices. They however produce over 90 per cent of the food of Ghanaians. There is therefore need to innovatively create markets for foodstuffs being produced by them. Many suggestions were made with respect to this issue during the country-wide stakeholder consultations. They included the need of a drive to promote the consumption of locally made foodstuffs and to incentivize the private sector to purchase local foodstuffs for processing or for onward sale to areas of need. The public procurement system should also enable schools, hospitals, prisons and other organized institutions to purchase local foodstuffs. There are also suggestions to create farmer’s markets across the country where farmers can once in a week sell their produce directly to consumers. As stated earlier, effective marketing cannot take place without grading and standardizing of the produce. Methods such as those used by WFP in parts of the Brong Ahafo Region should be replicated across the country.

3) Apart from market creation within Ghana, there is a need to look beyond the country to the Sahel countries and even to countries outside West Africa. There should indeed be greater South-South cooperation in the area of agriculture trade to redress this problem of wastage in the developing countries. A priority action is for the various agricultural and trade ministries in countries interested in the idea to start discussions and drawing up plans to start the process.

4) Many stakeholders at all levels have also called for the promotion of small and medium-scale irrigated agriculture, especially in the drier parts of the country. That is certainly necessary and helpful for the eradication of hunger, especially in the rural areas. At our current level with irrigated agricultural in Ghana (less than 5 per cent of total cultivated area ) and given the level of investments required in irrigated agriculture, sustainable irrigation development can only be undertaken gradually, within a long term plan. The promotion of sustainable rain-fed agriculture should be the short, medium and long-term priority.

SDG TARGET: END MALNUTRITION

Ending malnutrition means starting from the beginning of life cycle, that is maternal nutrition should be given a lot more attention because a malnourish mother will give birth to a malnourish child, and the cycle will continue. The NHIS is available but it does not meet all the needs of the pregnant women. There are also programmes by the government and other agencies to ensure proper child care and feeding practises in Ghana. Pro-poor programmes include the LEAP, which targets poor households and pregnant and lactating women. Exclusive breast feeding and complementary feeding, school feeding programme, Infant and Young Child Feeding (IYCF), free NHIS and others are other government programmes that support child nutrition. However, due to several factors including the lack of resources, the programmes are not very effective.

CHALLENGES OF FOOD AND NUTRITION SECURITY PROGRAMMES

The following are some of the main challenges of food and nutrition security programmes:
• Inadequate funding of food and nutrition security programmes at all levels: national, regional, district and community has been a chronic problem.

• Human resource capacity of districts for nutrition activities is woefully inadequate. Most districts have 2-3 nutrition officers in charge of all nutrition programmes so there is hardly any nutrition technical officer at the point of service delivery.

• There is weak inter-ministerial collaboration. Food and nutrition security is multi-sectorial and so without strong collaboration of the relevant ministries and agencies very little can be achieved.

• There is lack of proper documentation on what segments of the population are foods insecure and what foods are considered as food by the people.

• Disproportionate attention is paid by partners to nutrition programmes in different districts even within the same region.

• There is very inadequate supervision and monitoring of programmes.

• The process of selection of schools for school feeding is an issue in several places. In some region the right schools have not been selected and therefore the meals are not provided for those who are in need. Additionally, the amount of money spent on each child in the school feeding programme (GHS 0.80 per child per day) is grossly inadequate. This tends to influence the kind of meals given to the school children. This therefore defeats the purpose of the programme. Also meals provided by the school feeding programmes are substandard partly due to lack of nutrition personnel to help with meal planning. The school feeding caterers are also not using fortified food ingredients.

• IYCF has some major gaps:
o Exclusive breastfeeding is not done by a majority of mothers due to time constraints as well as the duration of maternity leave, which is only for 3 months.
o There is sub-optimal complementary foods and feeding practices coupled with shortfalls in minimum dietary diversity standards for IYCF.

• Women and children do not meet nutrient requirements for micronutrients of public health importance (vitamin A Folic acid, Iron, and iodine) partly due to lack of knowledge, poverty and seasonality issues.

• There is lack of dietary diversity due to limited education on the subject to farm families.

• Though males form the largest percentage of farmers, they have not been involved in many of the educational programmes of proper care and feeding practices. This limits their understanding of nutrition security and their ability to ensure that children and other vulnerable groups are well cared for and fed.

• Poverty is the backbone of hunger and malnutrition but support systems for farmers to increase production to ensure food security is not efficient partly due to inadequate agricultural and nutrition extension.

• There is very inadequate promotion of bio-fortified foods such as orange-flesh sweet potatoes and yellow-flesh cassava.

HEALTH CARE DELIVERY CHALLENGES THAT INDIRECTLY IMPACT ON NUTRITION

Other challenges related to health care delivery that indirectly impact on nutrition include the following:
• There are inadequate staffs at health facilities.
• There are also inadequate monitoring and supervision of the work being done by health workers.
• There are very poor health worker attitudes. (Health workers these days especially the nurses enter the profession because of the benefits they will get and not the passion they have for it).
• There are very inadequate rehabilitation centres to manage malnourished children.
• There is also inadequate health education. (Instead of doing house to house education in the communities especially the CHNs/CHOs, they rather do static education at one point).
• Access to water (for personal hygiene and sanitation) in most health facilities is big challenge. Most of the facilities do not have access to clean water making it difficult for staff and clients to use toilet facilities.

NUTRITION SPECIFIC AREAS THAT NEED ACTION

For the above challenges, the following actions are suggested:
• Food and nutrition security is so important that government funding of food and nutrition security programmes must be ring-fenced and provided at the times required.
• There should be nation-wide nutrition sensitization since many people at all levels lack a good understanding of nutrition. Hidden hunger (micronutrient deficiency), for example, is not well known to the generality of the population and that explains why many people do not regard fruit and vegetables as “food”. Also, foods that are fortified are not popular among the populace due to lack of information. Besides, adolescents constitute a key subgroup for special nutrition attention since early pregnancies are high and the young would-be mothers need special nutrients.
• Males should be encouraged to attend ANC/WCW with their wives.
• The amount given for the school feeding programme per child must be drastically increased.
• Government needs to partner with the private sector to strengthen the school feeding programme.
• Nutritionists at the district and community levels should be tasked to monitor schools under the school feeding programme and to advice on meal planning and preparation of quality foods.

This section of the report summarizes the key messages from stakeholder and community engagements on the road map to alleviating hunger and malnutrition. These are views of the people that government and its development partners need to seriously take into consideration to help in designing policy guidelines.

1. ALLEVIATING HUNGER AND MALNUTRITION REQUIRES COLLABORATIVE EFFORT ACROSS SECTORS.

a. There should be good collaboration among the ministry of health/Ghana health sectors, the ministry of food and agriculture and the food and drugs authority. This inter-ministerial collaboration is important since most of their roles overlap.

b. Folk perceptions about agriculture and farming should be reconsidered. Many people think that, farming is not lucrative and actually for “school drop outs”. There should therefore be sensitization and educational programs right from the junior high school to change the thinking of people and encourage more to go into agriculture. The practice of asking students to work on farms as punishment affects their perception of agriculture as an altogether punitive vocation.

c. Agriculture should be seen as a business: market-led approaches should be emphasized including the setting up of enterprises and provision of inputs and (including equipment) for food production. The entire value chain should be considered for improvement.

d. Statistical services should be generating data at regional and district levels and government organizations should be encouraged to work closely with the Ghana statistical service. The Ghana statistical service (GSS) has been trying to undertake an agriculture census but has not been able to secure enough resources. If basic input-output information could be collected on routine bases at the district level by GSS that can help in the estimation of areas cultivated to different crops, outputs and yields. Other important data include food consumption from consumption surveys and anthropometric information to determine nutrition status.

2. THE AGRICULTURE SYSTEM IN GHANA.

a. There should be cross-sectional or cross-ministerial collaboration to formulate and implement policies and programmes. For instance, the ministry of food and agriculture (MoFA) is not primarily responsible for carrying out research and therefore must include research institutions (such as MESTI, CSIR etc.) in seed production researches. This implies that, there should be consultations with research organizations and institutions who are already in the system and are on the ground. For instance, there is risk of army worm infesting maize and cocoa and therefore the potential threats of outbreaks. One farmer almost committed suicide because army worms destroyed his entire maize farm in Afigya-Sekyere in the Ashanti region during the 2015 farming season.

b. There is a need for agricultural research to impact food production. Researches should develop a compendium of critical agricultural problems in Ghana that requires search, advocate and push for a policy on priority agricultural research areas so that government and donors can be guided accordingly.

c. Reliance on donor funding for research is too risky, does not address the critical issues because all donors have their own pet interests and agendas, and is not suitable.

d. Access to agricultural equipment such as tractor services is generally limited and this is even more so for women farmers. Some women reported they have devised some strategies where they ask the tractor operators to plough for them on credit so they can make payments after harvest. However, this becomes psychologically challenging when there is a poor harvest.

e. Agricultural extension should be supported; there should be funding for dissemination of agricultural findings. This is because the lack of extension services is now a great challenge in the country.

f. There should be enforcement of the seed laws in the country to help enhance the seed system. To ensure effective development of our food systems the country the country must aim at seed security. We must depend on our own research institutions and MoFA to produce the needed seeds.

g. Farming should also be made attractive to the youth through the availability of seeds for planting, mechanization and irrigation to support production.

h. Government should ensure that farmers, processors, pickers etc. obtain remunerative prices for their produce.

i. There should be a ready market for the various food crops in the country. For example, the Ghana Cocoa Board is the sole buyer from cocoa farmers. Such ready markets should also be organized for other crops. A farmers’ market (a set day they all sell their produce) should be encouraged as this can help regulate the price of farm produce.

j. Attention should be given to addressing post-harvest losses and storage since most crop do not have a long shelf life resulting in spoilage/wastage. For example, there should be “grain banks” where farm produce should be stored.

k. The livestock and fingerlings industries and associated logistics should be enhanced e.g. with feed and proper transportation.

l. Land policy is either weak or non-existent; zoning of fertile lands for farming in each district should be done. This will prevent farmlands from being used for housing and other infrastructure.

m. The current trend where most good agricultural lands are being sold to estate developers must be stopped even if it means government buying those lands and leasing them for farmers for farming purposes.

n. Expensive labour: finding money to hire labour is challenging to most farmers and these forces some of them to rely on chemical spraying as a short cut with its attendant problems.

o. Financial institutions themselves are not willing to support farmers with credits or loans due to the potential risks involved in farming. Farmers informed us that, the original mandate of the Agriculture Development Bank (ADB) was to support farmers, which was initially fulfilled. However, currently, the Agricultural Development Bank operates just like the other financial institutions.

p. The market system in Ghana calls for standardization of market prices for farm produce. Prices of farm produce should not be solely determined by market women. Farmers are forced to sell to market women sometimes at low prices due to the fact that failure to do so will result in their farm produce rotting.

q. Standard measures and grading of produce should be pursued to ensure farmers value for their produce.

3. THE IMAGE OF AGRICULTURE IN GHANA.

a. “farming is somehow seen as a punishment” so most people would rather work as artisans and in offices than in farming . it is basically a disincentive to young men and women to go into farming.

b. Integrate agriculture into mainstream education from basic through secondary as a core subject.

c. Using farm work as punishment in schools should be discouraged.

d. There should be strengthening of research, extension and farmer linkages and all the other actors along the value chain because there seems to be poor collaboration between the different actors and the different agricultural intervention projects/programs. Also, government’s invention programmes should have a specific plan.

e. E-extension should be encouraged in the country but must also take into consideration the fact that a majority of the farmers cannot read.

f. Volunteer extension agents should be incentivized since there are a limited number of extension officers currently.

g. Small scale irrigation, already practised by small farmers, should be improved upon and irrigators supported to increase production.

4. NUTRITION AND HEALTH

a. Nutrition is a fundamental human right for every person.

b. Homestead gardens should be promoted.

c. Need for a nutrition calendar for all regions at the district level to aid in planning against food and shortages and to respond to actions from crop failures.

d. Malnutrition leads to poverty and vice versa.

e. Lack of knowledge on food groups and nutrient profile.

f. Globalization of market systems leading to influx of processed foods and beverages that is not nutritionally good.

g. At the school level physical education should be encouraged and intensified

h. Educating people to exercise and be more physically active is necessary.

i. Sensitization on good eating habits as a preventive measure.

j. Government to give incentives to industries which are interested in food fortification.

k. There should be proper segmentation of the population to determine what the particular challenges in each are and properly address them.

l. Stability in farming methods to prevent foods from going ‘extinct’.

m. Regulatory bodies should be equipped with enough logistics to ensure compliance and to monitor food safety even at the micro level.

n. Organic farming should be encouraged to help with the issue of the abuse of chemicals.

o. The need to adopt an enterprise approach to the food and nutrition security situation even at the micro level.

p. There is a need for sensitization on the dangers of the increasing “chemicalization” of food.

q. Health-worker attitude towards patient is varied but some challenges arise when they are overwhelmed with increased work load.

r. Water for household chores and drinking is not easily available and sometimes the quality is compromised by human activities such as illegal gold mining and pollution of water bodies.

s. Food safety is the major challenge with respect to use of pesticides, insecticides and preservatives. Tighter laws and regulations along the food path and value addition chain should be promulgated.

t. No regulation on advertisement so junk foods and alcoholic beverages are promoted and this has serious implications on overweight/obesity, hidden hunger and general health of the people.

As Ghana explores more avenues for revenue generation to fuel national development, bee farming/keeping has emerged as an area with great economic potential for creating viable businesses and employment for many Ghanaians.
Bees are not only important for the production of honey, which is the world’s most popular natural sweetener; they are equally beneficial for their role in plant pollination. Without the bees’ natural role, food production would be at risk as bees pollinate approximately 35% of food crops consumed by humans.
The value of global trade of honey, besides other bee products, is estimated to be over $600 million, and in Africa, honey is produced in several countries with Ethiopia, Kenya, and Tanzania, leading as the largest honey producers on the continent.
Other products that bees produce that are in high demand include beeswax, which is widely used in both the skincare and cosmetic industries, as well as in shoe, furniture and candle manufacturing, propolis, which is used in medicines and cosmetic products, and honey bee venom, also known as apitoxin, commonly used as treatment for rheumatism and other joint diseases.

Origins
There are more than 20,000 species of wild bees. Many species are solitary (e.g., mason bees, leafcutter bees ( Megachilidae),carpenter bees and other ground-nesting bees). Many others rear their young in burrows and small colonies (e.g., bumblebees and stingless bees). Some honey bees are wild e.g. the little honeybee ( Apis florea ), giant honeybee (Apis dorsata ) and rock bee ( Apis laboriosa ). Beekeeping, or apiculture, is concerned with the practical management of the social species of honey bees, which live in large colonies of up to 100,000 individuals. In Europe and America the species universally managed by beekeepers is the Western honey bee ( Apis mellifera ). This species has several sub-species or regional varieties, such as the Italian bee (Apis mellifera ligustica ), European dark bee ( Apis mellifera mellifera ), and the Carniolan honey bee (Apis mellifera carnica ). In the tropics, other species of social bees are managed for honey production, including the Asiatic honey bee (Apis cerana).

Wild honey harvesting
Collecting honey from wild bee colonies is one of the most ancient human activities and is still practiced by aboriginal societies in parts of Africa, Asia, Australia, and South America. Gathering honey from wild bee colonies is usually done by subduing the bees with smoke and breaking open the tree or rocks where the colony is located, often resulting in the physical destruction of the nest.
Early forms of honey collecting entailed the destruction of the entire colony when the honey was harvested. The wild hive was crudely broken into, using smoke to suppress the bees, the honeycombs were torn out and smashed up — along with the eggs, larvae and honey they contained. The liquid honey from the destroyed brood nest was strained through a sieve or basket. This was destructive and unhygienic, but for hunter-gatherer societies this did not matter, since the honey was generally consumed immediately and there were always more wild colonies to exploit. But in settled societies, the destruction of the bee colony meant the loss of a valuable resource; this drawback made beekeeping both inefficient and something of a “stop and start” activity. There could be no continuity of production and no possibility of selective breeding, since each bee colony was destroyed at harvest time, along with its precious queen.

Protection for the beekeeper
One of the key activities in the life of a Beekeeper is collecting honey from often jealously guarded beehives. To achieve this, most beekeepers wear some protective clothing before attempting to retrieve honey. Typically, experienced beekeepers wear gloves, a veil and boots to guard against bee stings when invading a beehive.
Smoke is another significant line of defense for the beekeeper. Most beekeepers use a “smoker”—a device designed to generate smoke from the incomplete combustion of various fuels. Smoke calms bees; it initiates a feeding response in anticipation of possible hive abandonment due to fire. Smoke also masks alarm pheromones released by guard bees or when bees are squashed in an inspection. The ensuing confusion creates an opportunity for the beekeeper to open the hive and work without triggering a defensive reaction.

Composition of Bee colonies
In bee colonies, the queen is the only sexually mature female in the hive and all of the female worker bees and male drones are her offspring. The queen may live for up to three years or more and may be capable of laying half a million eggs or more in her lifetime. At the peak of the breeding season, a good queen may be capable of laying 3,000 eggs in one day, more than her own body weight. The queen is raised from a normal worker egg, but is fed a larger amount of royal jelly than a normal worker bee, resulting in a radically different growth and metamorphosis. The queen influences the colony by the production and dissemination of a variety of pheromones or “queen substances”. One of these chemicals suppresses the development of ovaries in all the female worker bees in the hive and prevents them from laying eggs.

Mating of queens
The queen emerges from her cell after 15 days of development and she remains in the hive for 3–7 days before venturing out on a mating flight. Mating flight is otherwise known as “nuptial flight”. Her first orientation flight may only last a few seconds, just enough to mark the position of the hive. Subsequent mating flights may last from 5 minutes to 30 minutes, and she may mate with a number of male drones on each flight. Over several matings, possibly a dozen or more, the queen receives and stores enough sperm from a succession of drones to fertilize hundreds of thousands of eggs. If she does not manage to leave the hive to mate—possibly due to bad weather or being trapped in part of the hive—she remains infertile and becomes a drone layer , incapable of producing female worker bees. Worker bees sometimes kill a non-performing queen and produce another. Without a properly performing queen, the hive is doomed.

Mating takes place at some distance from the hive and often several hundred feet in the air; it is thought that this separates the strongest drones from the weaker ones, ensuring that only the fastest and strongest drones get to pass on their genes.

Starting a Profitable bee farming venture
The standout advantage of venturing into bee farming is the relative ease from business conception to actualization stage. The venture is surprisingly easy to start and guarantees a steady stream of income with the application of the right technique.

Typically, a significant part of start-up capital for a beekeeping venture goes into the construction of boxes where the bees will build their hive. Once this is secured mostly by contracting a carpenter, a protective gear is the next vital tool needed.
Because of the increased aggression by bees when the beehive is heavy (loaded with honey), a smoke sprayer or dispenser becomes a must-have-especially as it not only serves the purpose of significantly reducing the aggression of bees by inhibiting their defense system.

Additionally when considering a stint in beekeeping it is important to ensure that beehive site is removed from residential dwellings. This is to minimize sting incidences; which have proved fatal in some cases.
After considering the aforementioned, the cardinal component which is obviously getting the bees becomes the next task for anyone venturing into the beekeeping. To court the attention of bees, one simply needs to buy some honey-especially the unprocessed one. Once the honey is available, a beekeeper could proceed to smear the honey within the boxes- and of course hang them in secure locations –preferably in tree and roof tops.
Depending on the swarm of bees that a beekeeper is able to attract, the average time before harvest is 6 weeks. At this point the bee keeper’s effort is often rewarded with enough honey to attract some good money.

Potential for Ghana
Ghana could become a leading producer of honey in Africa if necessary attention is channeled to the area. With healthy living crusaders advocating it as a healthier alternative for refined sugar and the increasing global demand for honey it is easy to see that Ghana has been presented with a fertile ground for job creation and foreign exchange.
Only in 2016, the industry’s global value, globally, was estimated at US$2.2billion, up by an average 27.1percent for all exporting countries since 2012, when natural honey shipments were valued at US$1.8 billion.
In the world of manufacturing, a lot of multinationals use honey to make cosmetic products such as skin care lotions, soaps, and lip balms, a lot of health conscious people are replacing sugar with honey in their tea and other meals.
This increasing demand for honey is a conspicuous testament that honey is a genuine money-maker that has to be taken advantage of. This is why a recent effort by The Ghana Beekeepers Association (GBA) to seek greater support from government is laudable and timely.

It would be recalled that the association, in February 2017, presented a proposal to the Ministry of Food and Agriculture which outlines in detail the level of investment needed to fully exploit beekeeping in Ghana.
A peek at the highly ambitious proposal presented to the Ministry of Food and Agriculture revealed that Ghana stood a chance of emerging as foremost producer of honey globally with an investment of GH¢1.62billion that will consequently yield as much as GH¢2billion for the country annually in just a matter of ten years.
With increasing global demand for honey one would only hope that the relevant authorities will leap in support of the budding beekeeping industry to ensure that the potential of this promising industry is fully harnessed for the benefit of Ghanaians.

Women are the backbone of societal growth; and it’s difficult to think of any thriving sphere of life that is independent of a positive feminine influence.
In Ghana, the annals are strewn with outstanding women who have shone bright in often spectacular fashion. While this is refreshing, the prominences of women in a crucial facet of national life like agric remains underwhelming despite being central to the success of the hugely important sector.
Despite their central importance to agriculture, which sees women produce a great chunk of our food, women farmers are sadly excluded from conversations that determine agricultural policies, while unfair laws and practices deprive them of their land, their rights, and their livelihoods.
In Ghana, about 80% of agricultural production comes from small-scale farmers, who are mostly rural women. Women comprise the largest percentage of the workforce in the agricultural sector, a situation that means we cannot afford to treat women in agric with hands of levity.

Training is crucial
The training of rural women is very important, especially with the adoption of modern agricultural techniques that are tailored to local conditions and that use natural resources in a sustainable manner, with a view to achieving economic development without degrading the environment. The traditional and sometimes obsolete farming practices must give way to new forward-looking practices that will consequently lead to improved livelihood for these women and their dependents.
Training efforts must be backed by the provision of extension services, storage facilities, rural infrastructure (roads, electricity, and information and communication technologies), access to markets and access to credit, as well as supporting organizations and farmer cooperatives. This will ensure that the impact of training schemes is felt by the farmers- and in extension the society.
A commitment to training women farmers is a guaranteed means of breaking the vicious cycle that leads to rural poverty. Because of the nurturing role that women play in families, any intellectual investment made goes a long way to help build the capacity of several individual in society.

Affirmative action
Practicable affirmative action is by far one of the surest ways of safeguarding the interest of women in agriculture.
Instead of intermittent interventions, a solid affirmative action roadmap will go a long way to ensure that concrete success is achieved in efforts to improve the lot of women who have committed themselves to working hard to feed the country through the noble art of farming.

Networks operating in rural areas, especially rural women’s organizations are crucial to the conception of development programs. These organizations must partner in crafting any policies for women farmers as experience has shown that contributions from such actors are often invaluable.
A number of other changes will strengthen women’s contributions to agricultural production and sustainability. These include support for investment in rural areas in order to improve women’s living and working conditions; giving priority to technological development policies targeting rural and farm women’s needs and recognizing their knowledge, skills and experience in the production of food and the conservation of biodiversity; and assessing the negative effects and risks of farming practices and technology, including pesticides on women’s health, and taking measures to reduce use and exposure.

Feminization of agriculture
Feminisation of agriculture refers to women’s increasing participation in the agricultural labor force, whether as independent producers, as unremunerated family workers, or as agricultural wage workers. Specifically, feminisation of agriculture entails:
1. An increase in women’s participation rates in the agricultural sector, either as self-employed or as agricultural wage workers; in other words, an increase in the percentage of women who are economically active in rural areas.
2. An increase in the percentage of women in the agricultural labor force relative to men, either because more women are working and/or because fewer men are working in agriculture.

[ Feminization of Agriculture: Trends and Driving Forces]
According to the FAO, while the proportion of the labor force working in agricultural declined over the 1990s, the proportion of women working in agriculture increased, particularly in developing countries. In some regions such as Africa and Asia, almost half of the labor force is women. This trend has been called the feminisation of agriculture. This feminisation of agriculture is caused by increased “casualization” of work, unprofitable crop production and distress migration of men “for higher casual work in agriculture and non-agriculture sectors”, leaving women to take up low paid casual work in agriculture.

WIAD helpful
The Women in Agricultural Development Directorate (WIAD), one of the seven Technical Directorates of the Ministry of Food and Agriculture has since inception contributed significantly to the cause of women in the agric discipline. Set up with the mandate to supports livelihood and well-being of women in the agricultural sector, the body has made encouraging strides.
The Directorate of Agricultural Extension Services is credited with improving access to extension services for a healthy number of women who hitherto were deprived such opportunities.
The Statistic Research and Information Directorate has in the last few years managed to develop a functional data bank that has proved crucial to identifying the peculiar challenges of different groups of women farmers across the country.
As the body continues to strive harder however, extra effort from other stakeholders remains crucial to achieving a highly functional women agricultural workforce that is fully equipped to alter the status quo.

Elsewhere in Africa
While efforts to promote women interest in agric is gaining ground elsewhere on the African continent, Ghana surely has to do more. Recently, the Global Fund for Women has helped to bring African women farmers to the center of debates aimed at stirring the wheels of advocacy in favour of women farmers on the continent, through the Rural Women Striding Forward initiative. Rural women in Burkina Faso, Kenya, and Uganda received information, learned skills, and acquired networking opportunities – and as a result, they were able to provide more food for their families while advancing their human rights.
Key outcomes recorded as a result of the effort by the global fund for women included:
• 5-50% increase in crop yields.
• 30% increase in women’s income.
• 25% of women added one or more income-generating activities.
• The majority of households are now eating 3 meals per day.
• Women enjoyed more respect and became decision-makers in their homes.
• Women took on leadership roles in the community, joining village councils and forming advocacy networks.
There are significant gender disparities in the way that key resources essential for success in agriculture are distributed across Africa. Access to land, inputs, assets, markets, information and knowledge, time, decision-making authority and income still present a challenge for women in the sector.
Studies by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation, Farming First, and other organisations consistently show that throughout the world, women farmers control less land and make far less use of improved technologies and inputs such as fertiliser. They tend to have less access to credit and insurance and are less likely to receive extension services, which are the main source of information on new technologies in the developing world.

Conclusion
The mammoth effort put into our agric sector by women is too huge to ignore. It is so crucial that we must do everything in our power to safeguard .Failure to do this could see a catastrophic reversal of the massive gains that we have so painstakingly made since Ghana began putting together the foundations of a now burgeoning agric sector. First and crucially, legal and cultural barriers to ownership and access to land, information and extension services, inputs and other resources must give way to women friendly structures and rules that will aid the seamless rise of our women to the highest echelon of world agriculture.
Also important is the need to usher in a new epoch that will see women venture into agricultural education and training, research and extension services, as well as supply chain logistics, agri-technology, agric-policy-making and implementation. Our women are capable and must be encouraged to rise and rise!