By Eunice Tekie Tei
Anyinam (E/R), Nov 27, GNA – The Anyinam D/A Girls’ Model School has grabbed three awards from the farm project competition organized by Blue Skies Foundation and Kosmos Innovative Center, in the Eastern Region.
The school picked Best Entrepreneurial School of the year, Best Student in Agriculture (Junior High School Category) and the best Teacher Award in the Southern Zone of the school farm project awards.
The project aimed at encouraging the youth, especially females, to boost interest in agriculture and farming, began in 2015 and had so far engaged students in the production of sweet pepper and garden eggs.
Disclosing this in an interview with the Ghana News Agency, Mrs Mercy Obesebea Asare, headmistress of the school, explained that 77 JHS and SHS schools were selected in the Eastern Region and other schools across the country.
Five girls were selected from each school to participate in the competition in which simple farm tools and seeds were provided by the organizers to be nursed, grown, managed and sustained by the competitors.
Mrs Obesebea Asare said, as part of the school’s co- curricular activities, the school first participated in the competition in 2022, which they cultivated sweet pepper (Bell pepper) which was processed into pepper sauce for sale “and the income generated was used to buy a printer for the school administration block.”
She said in this year’s competition, the school had harvested four tons of garden eggs (Eggplant), which they intended to process into crispy garden eggs flakes to be sold for income.
The garden eggs variety (KIBIBI F1) cultivated for this year’s farm project contains nutritional values such as Iron, Magnesium, Vitamin B1, B6, Potassium and antioxidants such as chromogenic acid and anthocyanin’s which help to prevent cancer and also improves vision.
The headmistress indicated that they hoped to use the income from this year’s project to purchase a projector for the school’s Information Communications and Technology (ICT) laboratory to aid effective teaching of ICT, an examinable subject.
She said the school had reserved seed capital for next year’s project and had plans to expand the land size and integrate new technologies such as drip irrigation into their production.
Mr. Kwabena Panyin Nkansah, Atiwa East District Chief Executive, expressed appreciation to the organizers for the gesture and promised the assembly’s support to ensure the success of the competition.
He was hopeful that targeting girls in the project would go a long way to help minimize the high rate of teenage pregnancy in the district and the region at large.
GNA