Women farmers urged to enter commercial agriculture
The Deputy Minister of Food and Agriculture (Crops), Yaw Frimpong Addo, has called on Ghanaian women farmers to move from smallholder farming to commercial agriculture.
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He said large-scale farming would enable them to make profits and also contribute more to the socio-economic development of the country.
Mr Addo said because their farms were not big enough they were unable to reap much from the sector.
"In the smallholder farming, there is not much money in it. This is because their farms are small, so they are unable to get the impact that they need of agriculture," he said
Mr Addo made the call at the inaugural ceremony of the Ghana Association of Female Agriculture and Fish Farming Award Winners in Accra last Thursday.
The association is made up of the best female award winners in all the regions.
Women in farming
He advised women in farming to embrace the second phase of the Planting for Food and Jobs initiative, which he said was tailored towards commercial farming.
He added that the structure of the planting for food and jobs initiative would largely support women in agriculture.
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"So the phase two of the PFJ, I want women farmers to come together.
For example, I want an association like this to take full advantage it.”
“This is a new scheme coming up.
There will be opportunities for women to take advantage of especially the youth,” he added
He also encouraged the women and the youth to enter into processing, marketing and other chains of the agricultural process.
The chairperson of the Association, Ernestina Osei-Tutu, said the association aimed at giving a voice to women in agriculture at the national level.
She urged women in farming to change their mentality of seeing themselves among the least in the society and rather know that they were the pivot of the development of Ghana.
Intensive value chain
For his part, the chief of party of Ghana Mobilising Finance in Agriculture Activity, Dr Victor Antwi, said women provided critical labour-intensive value chain service such as planting, harvesting, cleaning, sorting, processing, packaging and recalling of crops.
He was, however, of the view that irrespective of their important role in the society, women's access to finance was constrained by barriers such as insufficient collateral for a bank loan, lack of bank accounts, low financial literacy and a fear of not being able to repay their loan.
On the supply side, he said financial institutions have difficulty lending to segments of the value chain where women operate due to elevated risk profiles, remote locations, small loans and low profitably.
“Without finance, women finance, women in the agricultural value chain lose opportunities to grow their businesses and this affects their potential incomes and livelihoods.”