MEDA Publications

Soy beans are a ‘game changer’ for families in the Upper West region of Ghana. GROW is showing the potential of this crop to provide a window for economic and social empowerment of women, bridge the food supply gap and improve families’ nutrition and wellbeing. With soy beans, women are diversifying their household food supplies and improving nutrition, especially for their children. For GROW, soy is the right crop: Soy improves nutrition and raises incomes.

GROW’s ultimate goal was to improve food security for 20,000 women farmers and their families in the Upper West Region of Ghana. Project activities centered around helping women improve the availability, access to and utilization of appropriate and nutritious foods. This paper uses a causal model to consider the pathways by which GROW impacted food security and nutrition.

Typically, economic development projects focused on agriculture and food security ignore the issue of land tenure. This is because most economic development projects tend to be gender-neutral, which is often gender-blind in reality, focused on male heads-of households, who tend to control economic resources with the assumption that the benefits will trickle down to women and children. For a women-centric project, like Greater Rural Opportunities for Women (GROW), MEDA found that land tenure was critical and underpinned women’s ability to participate in agriculture, their agricultural productivity – that includes access to all natural resources whether it be water, trees for firewood or fruits from the tress themselves – and ultimately, their income.

Women in northern Ghana have limited access to agricultural technology and are forced to do most of their farming activities manually, from clearing land to planting, harvesting and processing. In 2017, the GROW project launched a large-scale smart incentive program to increase women’s access to selected technologies through local commercial providers. MEDA worked to build a more sustainable market for the technologies by working on both the supply and demand side. Even with increased supply, the technologies are expensive for smallholder women farmers, many of whom would be unable to purchase even a single item of technology without financial support. For a limited period of time, the Technology Fund offered a smart incentive to women involved in the GROW project, allowing them to benefit from technology they could otherwise not afford. This paper focuses on a group of Women Sales Agents, market
intermediaries who connect smallholder women farmers to markets, who have purchased several technologies. This paper examines the impact of purchasing technology on women’s time use, income, working capital and social position in their communities, and makes recommendations for future programming.

This case study examines GROW’s Women Sales Agent (WSA) model as one of several methodologies to achieve project goals of increased market linkages and sustainability for women farmers in the Upper West Region of Ghana. With a vested interest in the growth and empowerment of women farmers, WSAs provide women farmers with information and embedded services in order to better integrate farmers into markets. This woman-to-woman model addresses the unique skills required to be a successful woman-centric intermediary in the soy value chain and is proving to be empowering for women, generating evidence of increased agency and access for WSAs, and to some degree for women farmers themselves.

Land degradation and erosion in Northern Ghana is rampant: The Upper West Region (UWR) region has very fragile soils as a result of the removal of crop residue and natural vegetation, overgrazing, bush burning and the cutting of trees for fuel, agriculture and construction. As a result, MEDA has promoted conservation agriculture (CA) practices in the Greater Rural Opportunities for Women (GROW) project: specifically, zero/minimum tillage, slash and mulch, crop rotation and intercropping and integrated pest management. This study analyzes the implementation of CA among the women smallholder farmers who participated in GROW, the challenges for women farmers in implementing CA in the UWR and the extent to which CA promotes environmental sustainability and mitigates climate change.

Over seven years of implementation, the GROW project has learned a great deal about women’s economic empowerment and food security in northern Ghana. The project team is happy to share our lessons learned in the GROW Learning Series, a set of documents we are releasing in 2018. Topics include women’s economic empowerment, nutrition and food security, financial inclusion, women and technology and conservation agriculture.

Within this Learning Series, the GROW team is producing three short briefs on the project’s financial services work, focusing on our crop insurance pilot, Village Savings and Loan groups and the targeted technical assistance provided to our financial services partners. This paper highlights GROW's journey with the Village Savings and Loan Association model.

Over seven years of implementation, the GROW project has learned a great deal about women’s economic empowerment and food security in northern Ghana. The project team is happy to share our lessons learned in the GROW Learning Series, a set of documents we are releasing in 2018. Topics include women’s economic empowerment, nutrition and food security, financial inclusion, women and technology and conservation agriculture.

Within this Learning Series, the GROW team is producing three short briefs on the project’s financial services work, focusing on our crop insurance pilot, Village Savings and Loan groups and the targeted technical assistance provided to our financial services partners. This paper highlights GROW's intervention regarding technical assistance to the project's financial service partners.

Over seven years of implementation, the GROW project has learned a great deal about women’s economic empowerment and food security in northern Ghana. The project team is happy to share our lessons learned in the GROW Learning Series, a set of documents we are releasing in 2018. Topics include women’s economic empowerment, nutrition and food security, financial inclusion, women and technology and conservation agriculture.

Within this Learning Series, the GROW team is producing three short briefs on the project’s financial services work, focusing on our crop insurance pilot, Village Savings and Loan groups and the targeted technical assistance provided to our financial services partners. This paper highlights GROW's experience piloting crop insurance for female farmers.

Over seven years of implementation, the GROW project has learned a great deal about women’s economic empowerment and food security in northern Ghana. The project team is happy to share our lessons learned in the GROW Learning Series, a set of documents we are releasing in 2018. Topics include women’s economic empowerment, nutrition and food security, financial inclusion, women and technology and conservation agriculture. This paper highlights GROW's successes and challenges with conservation agriculture in Northern Ghana.