The year was 1998. Lydia Sasu, the notable personality being profiled in this column, was then a civil servant in the Department of Women in Agriculture in the Ghanaian Ministry of Food and Agriculture and also the Coordinator of the Freedom from Hunger Campaign of the Food and Agriculture Organization...

Thirty-five delegates from the Ghana Federation of Forest and Farm Producers (GhaFFaP) have been taught about agroecological best practises and the introduction of microorganisms into soils using locally accessible materials. The four-day training session was co-organized by GhaFFaP and Lifeworks Global in Techiman, Bono East, and gathered participants from Ghana's...

ORGIIS Ghana, also, Organisation for Indigenous Initiatives and Sustainability, is a local non-profit, non-governmental organization (NGO) in the Upper East Region. The organisation is on a mission to empower people using local knowledge to create sustainable communities through indigenous and endogenous development. Its strategic location in Paga allows the organisation...

Tele-Bere, a community-focused organization, is helping smallholders to boost their incomes, market their sustainable forest products, and more. It is a member of the Trillion Trees: Sahel and Great Green Wall community and a Forest and Farm Facility partner.

Solidaridad and partners implement the three-year (2021 to 2024) Better Chicken for a Better Future project to create a fully functioning, inclusive and integrated value chain that provides decent jobs and better incomes for small-scale poultry farmers in Ghana.

A confluence of concerns about tropical forest loss, global warming, and social inequality drive calls to transform land use governance. Yet there is widespread debate about what must be transformed, by whom, and how. The increasing equation of transformation with ambitious, quantitative global targets, such as “net zero emissions” or...

It was a sunny Saturday morning, full of life and energy as we arrived in one of the beautiful and serene farming communities in the hinterlands. Whilst one could easily be put off by the roughness of the roads to the community, the freshness of the air in such forest...

Communities living in Northern Ghana face a complex situation due to a lack of livelihood options in the semi-arid area. Listen to the latest episode of Let’s Talk Trees to find out more. Eric Bayala and Houria Djoudi explore the problem and possible solutions to this longstanding issue through the...

Women and youth-led agri-enterprises (WYE) (which may also be operating as family businesses) in agricultural value chains have been identified as catalysts for rural transformation given their potential for creating employment and stimulating value addition both on and off-farm. Given that agriculture and food systems are likely to remain the...

Mike Abaka-Edu, President of the Western Region branch of the Ghana National Canoe Fishermen Council (GNCFC), makes a compelling case for banning ‘saiko’ fishing in this interview with Peter Adjei, a Member of ICSF. The Ghana National Canoe Fishermen Council (GNCFC) was formed in 1982 with the objective of promoting the...

The impact of COVID 19 on food security in Africa has been among the most widely discussed subjects since the first cases of COVID-19 in Africa broke in February 2020. Most of the narratives were alarming. The headlines put Africa at the brink of an unprecedented humanitarian crisis caused by...

This practice describes a local innovation used by a local farmer to address the major constraints in the production of mango in Ghana, such as low productivity resulting in high cost of production, inadequate control of insect pests and diseases, poor post-harvest management relating to the handling, grading and packaging,...

The 2021 United Nations Food Systems Summit was designed to create a path towards transforming the global food system so that it feeds the world sustainably, equitably, and inclusively. Small-scale farmers and other rural people must play an essential role in doing that. They are the backbone of the global...

Ghana signed a Voluntary Partnership Agreement (VPA) with the European Union in 2009, as part of the EU’s Forest Law Enforcement, Governance and Trade (FLEGT) Action Plan to address illegal logging.     In this context, the FAO-EU FLEGT Programme partnered with Kumasi Wood Cluster (KWC) through two consecutive projects to assist Small...

Ghana’s work to promote the legal timber trade, in partnership with the European Union (EU), strongly emphasizes involving local communities who live in or near forests. Yet many farmers and communities don’t understand their rights, which means that illegal activity by loggers has gone unchecked in Ghana’s off-reserve forests. The...

In March 2020, a regional inception workshop was held in Ghana a project of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (Norad) entitled Enhancing the contribution of small-scale fisheries to food security and sustainable livelihoods through better policies, strategies and...

Half of the 1.5 billion people globally who rely on forest landscapes for subsistence and cash income are women. Many see the benefits of participating in various forest and farm producer organisations (FFPOs). These include both general community, smallholder farmer and indigenous people’s organisations and more specific women-only groups –...

The solar maize dryer is a construction that dries maize through solar energy. It is a construction that resembles a greenhouse. It takes three days to reduce the moisture content of maize from 24 to 14 percent. Drying maize reduces the risk of mould and aflotoxins and helps farmers to...

The implementation of the SSF Guidelines should be based on human-rights principles and standards, factoring in local conditions. In June 2014, the 31st session of the Committee on Fisheries (COFI) of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) endorsed the Voluntary Guidelines for Securing Sustainable Small-Scale Fisheries in...

The ahotor oven represents an improvement on the widely used chorkor smoker, and is an energy- and time-efficient fish smoking technology. My recent tours in some coastal communities in the Central, Western and Volta Regions of Ghana exposed me to a daily reality of fishmongers in the region. As part of...