By Gilbert Azeem Tiroog
Bolgatanga, June 24, GNA – The Widows and Orphans Movement (WOM), a gender-focused organisation, has urged smallholder women farmers to prioritise the production of demand driven crops to attract the needed market.
It also asked the women to adopt crops that were high yielding and expand productivity to increase household food and nutritional security and income levels of their families.
Ms Nancy Awinbisa Amiziah, the Project Officer, WOM, made the call in Bolgatanga, at a sensitisation workshop on access to marketing opportunities for leaders of the smallholder women farmers in the Nabdam District of the Upper East Region.
The farmers, drawn from 10 communities in the district, were taken through a marketing plan, crop production planning and management, variety of seeds and their prices, agriculture projects, and opportunities available for women farmers, among others.
The training, organised in collaboration with ActionAid Ghana, another NGO, formed part of the Green Economy project, aimed at promoting food security and climate change resilience.
Ms Amiziah said crops which were in high demand and high yielding would not only help them to address the difficulty in selling their produce as experienced with some traditional crops over the years but would also enable them to recoup their investment.
It would also open them up for support from organisations in demand for Agriculture produce, she added.
Ms Amiziah indicated that knowledge gap in demand driven, and high yielding crops had been identified as challenges thwarting efforts of many farmers particularly smallholder women farmers leading to low productivity and sales.
“So, we have organised this training for them and especially at this period of the season to not only inform them about cropping but also equip them to maximise their limited lands to get higher yields to support their families and earn income for themselves,” she said.
Mr Emmanuel Akobta, the Nabdam District Agriculture Engineer and facilitator of the workshop, reiterated that Guinness Ghana, for instance, was offering free tractor services and seeds to farmers who were into the production of white sorghum with the intention of buying the produce once they were willing to sell and urged them to take advantage of the initiative.
He said the Agriculture Department of the District was committed to assisting the farmers to succeed and encouraged them to call on the department whenever they required assistance.
Madam Janet Kakisi, the Leader of the Gane-Asonge women farmers, said the training had given her enough techniques to succeed in farming and she would ensure her members benefited from the knowledge shared.
GNA