AICCRA Country Scaling Vision: Ghana

Ghana conceptual framework to achieve country’s scaling vision was constructed around mutually reinforcing key elements interacting with one another to produce the desired outcomes: innovation (CSA/CIS), beneficiaries, enabling environment, drivers and service providers. Monitoring evaluation and the associated learning is identified as an integral part of the process. Critical decisions need to be made in terms of scaling mechanisms to embrace, advocacy and science-policy dialogues, strategic partners to engage, CSA/CIS potential to drive the outcomes, their costs and accessible financial structures and products

Situational Analysis and Gender and Social Inclusion Strategy: Towards the making of gender and youth smart innovations in Ghana

The working paper presents AICCRA Ghana's situational analysis on differential access to and use of agriculture resources in intervention communities and highlight our strategy to mainstream gender and social inclusion into AICCRA's innovations. Through a traingulation of data from literature review, needs assessments, and baseline study, the document discusses gender and generational differences in access to and use of land, labour, capital, extensions services and participation in farmer based organisations. The document highlights how the identified gender and generational gaps are rooted in community norms and customs that define who has access to what resources under what conditions. Resulting from the situational analysis, the document presents a strategy to mainstream gender and social inclusion that builds on two main pillars: 1.Capacitation of AICCRA partners/collaborators, and farmers in communities, households and organised groups to improve access and use of Climate Smart Agriculture (CSA) and Climate Information Services (CIS) 2. Transformational dialogues with partners/collaborators and communities to reflect and change norms that entrech gender and generational inequalties

Climate-Smart Cocoa: a gender transformative approach

In general, government agricultural extension services were low or inadequate in many communities. Farmers reported not having adequate information on sound farm management practices and when they do come, they come in late. The gendered differences on access to information were also evident. Most people who access extension services were men with bigger cocoa farms. Women and youth receive less extension services which was attributed to their poor resource base. Agricultural interventions were sometimes structured in ways that favour men with the unitary model of household logic which assumes that whatever the man learns will trickle down to the household. Meanwhile, the households themselves are spaces for the entrenchment of gender and generational ideologies and hierarchical power dynamics. The study found that in almost all communities, while older men favoured women’s involvement in decision making and for them to take control of cocoa related decision making, they only accepted this for instrumental reasons such as the benefits that the household will derive from it. Most importantly, many male youth disfavoured women’s participations in decision making. The reasons for these included the fact that women are made to help men and the labour intensiveness of cocoa production among others. This requires programmes that are modelled with a Gender Transformative Approach (GTA) framework that will tackle the individual level capacities, social relations and the inherent institutional rules of organisations that work in the cocoa sector. Recommendations i) Initiate programmes and campaigns that aim at behavioural change, especially targeting the discriminatory practices and patriarchal norms in communities. This means excavating traditional practices that promote equity and gender equality and combining these with modern ones. These messages should target specific constituencies such as youth who are more averse to women’s participation in decision making. a) Initiate youth clubs where conversations are held about gender inequality and equity. ii) Develop gender sensitive extension service and training programmes that take into account literacy levels of the various social groups, local farm management practices and indigenous knowledge. a) Develop content in the Ghanaian languages spoken in the communities. b) Design programmes in formats that are clear, concise, accessible, sensitive and friendly to farmers especially women and youth. This should include the use of multiple dissemination channels such as community information centres, Farmer Based Organisations (FBOs), info graphics, local radio, storytelling, community durbars, festivals, religious activities and theatre among others. c) Integrate climate change and variability information in extension service delivery iii) Initiate affirmative action programmes through ensuring that the leadership of producer-based organisations in communities have women in leadership positions. iv) Promote safe traditional and modern savings and loans schemes to encourage savings and to enhance access to loans in times of shock. a) Support local credit schemes with resources to function in ways that promote equity and equality. These should target women, youth, poorer farmers and other vulnerable social groups. v) Design programmes that create a pool of labour-saving technologies in communities for easy access. a) Identify agricultural and non-agricultural labour-saving technologies that are required in communities. b) Identify ways in which access can be enhanced especially for women and youth. c) Promote collective/group ownership of equipment and its management to ensure sustainability of the programmes. vi) Design programmes that help free women and girls of reproductive roles so they can have enough time for productive activities and leisure. a) Invest in basic social services such as water and energy in communities. vii) Promote alternative on-farm and off-farm livelihood activities in farming communities through community-based discussion processes and skills development programmes. The programmes will promote reinvestment in cocoa production and vice versa. a) Promote food crop production as part of agroecological practices. b) Develop multiple clusters of livelihoods including animal rearing and crop production both in terms of intensification and extensification. c) Design programmes that encourage processing and value addition on agriculture and non-agricultural products to improve earnings. d) Create programmes that link rural producers to markets viii) Advocate for higher producer price for cocoa to compensate for farmer’s investment in production. ix) Design programmes that promote the health of farmers

Making CSA-CIS-One-health Innovations Inclusive: AICCRA Ghana activities on mainstreaming and customizing innovations to women and youth needs

AICCRA Ghana prioritized cowpea and sweet potato value chains for their women friendliness in addition to maize, yam and tomatoes which also involve substantial numbers of women and youth in their value chains. The project prioritized CSA technologies that are women and youth friendly including their lower associated drudgery, affordability, availability and socio-cultural acceptability. To disseminate these technologies, AICCRA Ghana ensured plots selected to host demonstration were convenient to women. The project intentionally selected women’s plots to host demonstration as a way to demystify cultural norms around the productivity of women’s farms. The project further customized field days to the meetings of women’s VSLA groups to encourage more women to attend. The project disseminated CIS through community radios which reached many women and was crucial for farm decision making especially the harvesting of cowpea. To improve women’s decision making in farmer based organizations, AICCRA Ghana convened women’s sub-groups and engaged in transformative dialogues around gender norms that impede their participation and leadership. This improved women’s collective action and improved their voice in FBOs

Climate-Smart Agriculture and Climate Information Services Action for Food Systems Transformation in Ghana: Capacity strengthening and Stakeholder consultation

AICCRA Ghana Cluster in collaboration with WA Regional Cluster and national, regional and international partners convened a two-week capacity strengthening event. The format of the event was hybrid with important in-person attendance arranged. The training aligns with the clusters expected contributions to specific project targets against four AICCRA performance indicators: PDO1- CCAFS partners and stakeholders in the Project area are increasingly accessing enhanced climate information services and/or validated climate-smart agriculture technologies; IPI 2.2- Partnerships launched/ strengthened between AICCRA-funded CGIAR and NARS scientists, universities, public sector stakeholders, farmer organizations, NGOs and private sector; IPI 2.3- People engaged in AICCRA-funded capacity development activities; and IPI 3.1- Validated climate information services and climate-smart agriculture technologies disseminated / made accessible. Therefore, the training was structured around four main segments: 1) Climate-smart one-health approach and partnership launch; 2) Early Warning & Rapid Response (EWRR) for a climate-smart IPM; 3) NFCS partnership strengthening and stakeholder consultation; 4) Enhancing access to CSA/CIS bundles while addressing gender and social inclusion (GSI)

Training Manual on Bundled Climate Smart Agriculture, Climate Information Services and One-Health Technologies for Priority Value Chains

The manual is an addendum to the prioritized and bundled Climate Smart Agriculture (CSA) and Climate Information Services Innovations that is One Health Sensitive. The manual is designed as an extension and training tool for trainers of trainees (TOT) and extension agents to support smallholder farmers most especially stakeholders in AICCRA intervention communities. Users will find the manual very useful and it is hoped that Agriculture Extension Agents (AEAs), farmers, students, and other end users will apply the modules to increase crop production in the target agroecologies. Specifically, the manual provides climate information services, climate smart agriculture innovations and one health intervention that have been prioritized along maize, cowpea, yam, sweetpotato and tomato value chains

The coping strategies of “men left behind” in the migration process in Ghana

Previous studies report that independent transnational female migration is growing rapidly in sub-Saharan Africa. Yet, scholarship on the ‘left-behind’ in the migration process largely focuses on women and children, with little attention paid to men left behind. Using qualitative methods, with Folkman et al.’s coping theory, to examine the coping strategies of men left behind in the migration process in Ghana, this study fills an important research gap in the migration and the left-behind literature. Through the snowball sampling method, 12 in-depth interviews were conducted with men in the Accra Metropolis whose spouses were staying abroad. Participants explained that left-behind husbands cope with domestic work and care through support from family relations, careful planning and time management, eating out in food joints, and paid services from domestic workers. Participants also mentioned that these men cope emotionally through social media, religion, regular visits to spouses and engaging in extramarital affairs. The results demonstrate that in the absence of migrant spouses, husbands adapt using a variety of coping mechanisms

Justice and Inclusiveness: The Reconfiguration of Global–Local Relationships in Sustainability Initiatives in Ghana’s Cocoa Sector

Pressure from the public and non-governmental organisations is pushing lead companies in the cocoa and chocolate sectors towards becoming more environmentally sustainable and socially just. Because of this, several sustainability programmes, certification schemes and delivery initiatives have been introduced. These have changed the relationship between chocolate companies, cocoa exporters, and small-scale farmers. This paper observes how large companies in the cocoa export and consumer markets are shifting away from their traditionally remote position in the cocoa sector. The pressure to ensure sustainability and justice has provoked more mutually dependent relationships with cocoa producers. Our analysis outlines the implications this emerging reconfiguration of global-local relationships has for procedural justice principles of interdependence and refutability, and the distributive justice principles of need and equity. These principles are important because they enable the different dimensions of inclusion: ownership, voice, risk, and reward. This paper highlights and qualifies arrangements surrounding these justice principles that manifest in the way five service delivery initiatives - associated with sustainability programmes and led by major buying companies in Ghana’s cocoa sector – are implemented. We show inclusiveness as an outcome of dynamic global-local relationships that are constantly reworked in response to smallholder farmers’ agency and state regulations. Portraying inclusiveness as an outcome of interactions changes its conceptualisation from a predefined ethical standpoint included in the design of standards to a result of unfolding mutual dependencies, which refashion how inclusive agriculture value chains work

Making knowledge work in practice

The premise of this chapter is that a focus on practices and their relationships opens a methodological space to investigate how a variety of actors or small groups make knowledge work. The chapter contextualises the methodological discussion in global commodity chains and local food markets, which feature a layered organisational set-up and spatially distributed tasks. It offers a methodological perspective which emphasises: (1) the use of knowledge to make situated practices work; (2) underlying processes of coordination emerging from mutually constituting practices distributed in space; (3) the processes configuring externally-induced and knowledge-based interventions with situated practices. This chapter combines literature at the interface between organisation studies, technology studies, and learning studies, using a practice lens to study knowledge as an accomplishment and an essentially social activity. Two case studies substantiate this methodological perspective: pruning in the global commodity chain of cocoa in Ghana; and the practice of aggregating volumes in local food markets for oilseed and edible oil in Uganda. The focus on knowing as emerging from situated practice is appreciative of local problem-solving capacities, and contributes to detecting and opening spaces for inserting these capacities in the specialised knowing generated in mainstream science and technology institutes

The contribution of non-cash remittances to the welfare of households in the Kassena-Nankana District, Ghana

This study examined the flow of non-cash remittances in the Kassena-Nankana District in Ghana. Twenty in-depth interviews were held with recipients (respondents) of non-cash remittances and thematic analysis was used to analyze the data. Findings revealed that non-cash remittances were in the form of foodstuff and electronic appliances and they were used for various purposes. The perspectives and experiences of respondents indicate that these transfers contribute significantly to improving household welfare. Thus, establishing institutional policies to facilitate the flow of non-cash remittances will not only benefit recipients but can also contribute to the socio-economic development of receiving countries through taxation.</p