Aside from providing clients with skills and knowledge regarding innovative farming and climate-smart farming, as part of the GROW2 project, women smallholder farmers have been introduced to farm technologies. This initiative is a step to reduce the amount of time spent on their farms, promote innovative farming, and increase yield.

For the past months, the project has organized innovation and technology fairs across all zones of influence under Urbanet to introduce to these farmers the various technological tools that have been made readily available to them. These sets of technologies, which include roller/push planters, shellers, threshers, and tricycles, among others, have been included in the project’s component as a way of motivating these farmers to not only become business-oriented in terms of their farming activities but also to consider a wide market scale when planning their farming.

These technologies will be made available to women at a 50% discount price to ensure that they can purchase them. Aggregators amongst them are encouraged to patronize technologies such as tricycles to ensure easy conveyance of produce to markets, while farmers are encouraged to patronise threshers, shellers, roller/push planters, and tarpaulins. However, clients will be allowed to patronize whichever technology they prefer, following the requirements that are set out by the project.

Farmers who were able to take advantage of last year’s technologies have been able to make the most of them through increased yield, and others have gone as far as commercializing them to earn an income and support others who were not able to purchase them. By the end of the project, one of the aims is to ensure that enough women can commercialize their farming and be part of the growing agribusiness landscape. These interventions, as well as previous ones, are some of the steps taken to ensure this.

The funding institution of the GROW2 project, Global Affairs Canada, and the major implementing partner, MEDA Ghana, have been very instrumental as far as providing sponsorship and layout for the implementation of the project. With the support of Key Implementing Partners (KFPs) like Urbanet and others on board, the project has moved in successive directions since its commencement.

As a KFP under the project, Urbanet Ghana has, for the past years, worked tirelessly in efforts to ensure that the target and planned impact of the project are achieved in its operational zones, the Northern and Savannah regions. To get a feel of the progress at the community level, representatives of GAC, through Urbanet, paid an official visit, alongside offices from MEDA Ghana, to some communities in the Savannah region to interact and engage with the clients (women smallholder farmers) under the project.

From GAC, the Senior Development Officer, Mr. Majeed Mohammed, and Country Project Manager for GROW2, Mr. Francis Essuman, and others had an active interaction with clients within the Sankunpe and Jiramoape communities in the Central Gonja district of the Savannah region, discussing project activities and the benefits they’ve had so far from the project.

At the Sankunpe community, an interaction was held with 123 women farmers who participated in the Good Agronomic Practices (GAPs), farm demonstrations and had access to organic fertilizers, financial literacy, the Gender Module Family (GMF), and agribusiness training, amongst others. While in Jiramoape, two Savings and Loan Groups (SLGs) were met regarding similar issues, with a focus on their linkage and access to financial services provided by partner institutions.

This visit was meant to gain a deeper understanding of their experiences of the project interventions, including the effectiveness and benefits of organic liquid fertilizers purchased by 46 farmers under the price discount program. And also an opportunity to gain insight into how financial empowerment and access to credit have positively impacted their communities. They were commended for their active participation and encouraged to work closely with the project officer in order to enjoy the full impact of the project.

Aside from enabling women farmers under the GROW2 project with innovative and climate-smart skills to boost farm yields, the projects encourage women to utilize their farm produce through agribusiness to ensure economic stability and freedom. Other vital components of the project, besides providing farm inputs, technologies, farm demonstrations, and skills, seek to ensure that clients can utilize their produce in ways that promote nutritional health, hence the recent food processing and utilization demonstration.

Over the past weeks, project officers under the GROW2 project have undergone a series of trainings on how to incorporate soybeans and groundnuts, two of the most cultivated foods by women farmers, into various everyday meals to enhance nutrition. These trainings, which took place in the Northern and Savannah regions, were necessary considering the level of malnutrition and food insecurity cases within some rural areas of the region.

This training was meant to educate these officers on the skills needed for this activity, which was meant to trickle down to their areas of operation. After this training, community-level training will be held across all Urbanet’s zones of influence, led by the project officers with assistance from WIAD officers. This activity will involve all women in these communities who are clients of the project and will take them through a step-by-step process on how to incorporate groundnuts and soybeans into their household dishes and how to prepare other nutritional dishes to combat malnutrition and promote food security through proper utilisation of foodstuffs.

During the food demonstrations, the women will be educated on the nutritional value of soybeans and groundnuts and how they can be used as replacements for other sources of nutrients that are not readily accessible to them due to financial constraints. They will also be taken through the significance of prioritizing nutritional well-being, especially for their children, and how to ensure constant practice to elevate their health status.

Under the Price Discount Program of the GROW2 project, clients are being supported to acquire farm technologies such as threshers, shellers, tricycles, and push/roller planters, amongst others, to support their farming and post-harvest activities in order to lessen their burden. The program supports women to purchase these technologies at a 50% discount.

Women farmers and aggregators are given the opportunity to choose their preferred technology based on what is most needed by them, with the help of project officers in their areas. This is to ensure that a lot of these women are able to patronize at least one technology due to the number of clients under Urbanet’s operational zones and the limited number of technologies available at the moment.

Distribution of patronized technologies began earlier this month and will continue until before the holidays and after. Owners of shellers and threshers will be taught how to operate, maintain, and utilize them in a way that benefits not only them but their communities or groups as a whole. This category of women will be supported in putting up sheds under which these machines will be placed. Meanwhile, women who patronize tricycles will be assisted as far as registering them is concerned.

So far, 24 tricycles and 7 shellers have been distributed to women within some of the districts, including the Nanton, Central Gonja, West Gonja and North Gonja districts. More technologies are expected to be distributed in the other districts before the year ends.

For the last three years, the WISE project has supported women farmers and aggregators to ensure they are economically empowered and have improved well-being and inclusive economic growth. Selected women farmers have been provided the necessary support to increase farm yield, ranging from improved soybean seeds for planting, ploughing their fields, and providing inoculants. Aside from the support for soybean production, the project has also introduced some of these women to green businesses, including mushroom, snail, and honey production.

The WISE project goes beyond supporting women to become economically capable. The project also prioritises the nutritional well-being of the communities, especially women and children. To ensure this, the WISE project team at URBANET organised a two-day Food Exhibition and Nutritional training with the help of a few experts.

The two-day programme was executed in two communities within the Tolon and Kumbungu districts in the Northern Region, with over thirty participants participating in each community. These participants were selected to represent the various communities in which the project is being executed. The key purpose of the training was to ensure that women were able to initiate businesses by adding value to the raw products they produced or harvested. It was also aimed at introducing the women to the various ways they could utilise their produce and transform it into meals that are nutritionally beneficial for them. The major food products that were used in the training included soybeans and mushrooms, as these two are the major foods produced by a majority of these amazing women.

The main aspect of the event was taking the women through how they could incorporate soybeans and mushrooms into various meals to enhance their nutritional status. They were taken through the preparation of both local foods that are common in their households and healthy paps for the infants. Some of the meals included soybean kebab (as a substitute for meat), soymilk, “tuubani”, mushroom pap, “tombrown”, and some mushroom beverages, amongst others. As important as it is for these women to adopt these nutritional ways of feeding, they were encouraged to use this as an opportunity to start a business venture and make use of previous training on branding and marketing to grow them.

Despite the vast establishment of microfinance institutions to provide banking services for the less privileged and alleviate poverty, not everyone has access to or the capacity to meet the banking terms. For this reason, Savings and Loan Groups (SLGs) have become the preferred alternative for a lot of people, especially women smallholder farmers (WSHFs) in various rural and even urban communities in Northern Ghana. A major outcome of the GROW2 project is to provide economic support to women in the various project zones; the project has identified the significance of these SLGs to women in this aspect. To this effect, provision is made to provide existing and new SLGs with the necessary knowledge, skills, and tools to help them derive more benefit from them.

During the course of the project’s implementation, URBANET’s project officers identified certain communities with existing SLGs, however, they had limited knowledge on how to maximise the impact of their savings as well as a more secure place for their daily contributions/savings. These existing SLGs have been recruited as clients of the GROW2 project and have received orientation on the project as well as its impacts on their groups and other aspects of the project they would benefit from. 

Most of these SLGs had their daily savings placed in plastic containers, food flasks, and other items that were not fit or secured to be used as “mini banks” or savings. With credit to URBANET’s Project Officers, these groups have been taken through a series of intensive training sessions on how to keep records, track members’ loans, ensure consistency of payment by members, and maximise and use benefits from the savings to transform the groups and assist members when the need arises. They have also been provided with secured boxes with locks to contain their daily savings in order to improve security and avoid theft.

URBANET has and will be identifying more interested women in the various Zones of Influence to create SLGs to improve their economic and financial status and their living standards. The Project also aims at ensuring that, through the SLGs, the women or clients are able to afford the many innovative technologies to assist them in their farming and entrepreneurial activities. 

The Empower Project is a youth-focused project implemented by URBANET Ghana with sponsorship from the EMPower-Emerging Markets Foundation to support about 100 youth (70 females and 30 males) between the ages of 20 and 24 with green skills to improve their livelihood and provide employment opportunities for them. The project aims at Empowering Young People in Transformative Beekeeping within four districts in the Northern Regions, including Yendi, Central Gonja, and the Nanumba North and South districts. 

The project aligns with URBANET’s vision to empower young people, improve livelihoods, provide a means to mitigate unemployment among the youth, and especially support girls to reduce the time spent on unpaid care work to provide more time for them to concentrate on their growth. URBANET has identified the need to provide avenues for the youth to live to their full potential, acquire skills that are beneficial to them and their communities, and provide a space for them to develop existing business ideas as well as the tools to start new businesses. The Empower project is focused on beekeeping as a green skill and source of employment for the beneficiaries, as well as a way to empower them to explore the existing market space.

 The project will, before implementation, select beneficiaries across the four districts based on the chances of whether beekeeping can thrive and on sensitization by the project lead, the GESI Coordinator at URBANET, Madam Nimatu Siisu, with the assistance of project officers. With support from experts, beneficiaries will be taken through intensive training on beekeeping and honey-making, marketing, and branding. They will be provided with protective gear, boxes for beehives, necessary tools, exposure, and access to trade fairs and conferences.

The project will ensure that, during and by the end of its implementation, beneficiaries can master the techniques of beekeeping and honey making, train others within their communities, be self-employed, and be empowered to be change agents. Aside from these, the URBANET’s focus on beekeeping is also an effort to promote green livelihood options in the face of climate change and associated challenges to smallholder farmers, especially women and youth, within these communities and the country at large, as beekeeping has a positive impact on the environment as it serves as a source of pollinators for crops, especially shea and cashew plants.