Ghana

Greater Rural Opportunities for Women 2

October 2021 - September 2026

The Greater Rural Opportunities for Women 2 (GROW2) project is building on the momentum from the GROW project to broaden women’s access to land, labor-saving, climate-smart technologies, affordable inputs, and sustainable business development services. The project promotes good agricultural and nutritional practices as well as community engagement for women’s economic empowerment.

Overview

Goal

The goal of the GROW2 project is to improve the economic and social empowerment of smallholder women farmers, entrepreneurs, and agribusinesses in Northern Ghana.

Scope

GROW2 aims to reach a total of 40,000 smallholder women farmers, 5,000 entrepreneurs, and 50 agribusinesses (at least 50% women-led) in the soybean, groundnut, and vegetable value chains.

Context

Women play a critical role in the Ghanaian economy and in supporting their household nutritional health and wellbeing. Despite women’s important contributions to the Ghanaian agricultural sector, they have limited access to land, technology, training (business and extension) and financial services. The situation is worse for women in rural areas of Northern Ghana where women have more limited agency to make decisions about their own lives.

Since women constitute 52% of the agricultural labour force, 70% of crop growers and 85% of food distributors, providing them with more equitable access to agricultural resources will boost economic growth and nutrition among families. Increasing access to these important resources can increase food security and improve livelihoods.

Opportunity

Increasing women’s access to climate smart technologies, improving gender equality within households and communities and improving the business environment are critical to boosting the agricultural productivity and food security in Northern Ghana and Ghana as a whole.

Strategy

The project is designed to make an impact in the following eight areas:

  1. Business Development and Advisory Services: Increasing the business capacities of women farmers, entrepreneurs, and agribusinesses.
  2. Market Systems: Strengthening market linkages for women farmers, entrepreneurs, and agribusinesses within the soybean, groundnut and vegetable value chains.
  3. Financial Inclusion: Increasing access to appropriate, inclusive, and green financial products and services for women farmers, entrepreneurs, and agribusinesses.
  4. Climate-smart Agricultural Practices: Improving the climate-smart agricultural capacities of women farmers and entrepreneurs.
  5. Nutritional knowledge: Increasing the nutritional knowledge of women farmers, entrepreneurs, and their households
  6. Women’s Socio-economic Empowerment: Increasing community support for socio-economic empowerment of women.
  7. Women’s Participation in Decision Making: Strengthening women’s capacity to participate in decision-making in the household, community, and private sector.
  8. Gender Division of Labor: Sharing unpaid care work with men for more equitable division of labor.

Funder

This program was undertaken with the financial support of the Government of Canada provided through Global Affairs Canada.