The beneficiary vegetable farmers with their project manager (3rd from right)
THE GHANA Commercial Agriculture Project (GCAP), in collaboration with the Japanese Government and the World Bank, recently sent some 10 selected agriculture entrepreneurs to tour and study Kenya’s vegetable farming sector.
Project Coordinator, Osei Owusu-Agyemang, who spoke with the media over the weekend at the Kotoka International Airport, said the 10 entrepreneurs who were selected through competitive screening were sponsored by the Japanese Government through the World Bank.
The World Bank gave a credit of US$150 million while the US Agency for International Development (USAID) co-funded the project with US$16.95 million.
According to him, the beneficiaries would be given cold vans and other facilities to enable them offer market access to vegetables across the country, especially in the five areas where the project was assisting smallholder farmers.
These areas are Ada, Kumasi, South Tongu, Michele Camp and Atomic Energy in Ga East.
Agribusiness Analyst for the GCAP, Galina Okartei-Akko, hinted that managers of the Ghana Peri-urban Vegetable Value Chain, with the Directorate of Crop Service at the Ministry of Food and Agriculture, were working to reduce post-harvest loses.
She said the 10 agribusiness entrepreneurs were anchor farmers who would be frontliners of the project in the five selected areas.
Planned to end in June 2020, the project would furnish the beneficiary farmers with access to water and train them to produce more according to specifications outlined in the Ghana Green Label (GGL) certification scheme.
The GGL certification scheme is government’s reaction to the growing consumer request for safe food production in an environmentally sustainable and healthy way for safe vegetables.
A beneficiary of the trip, Michael Gariba, who is the Chief Executive Officer of Fruit Master, in an interview, expressed enthusiasm about how the Kenyan Standard regulated that country’s vegetables sector.
He expressed the hope that Ghana’s Green Label would be enforced through appropriate quality control measures to revolutionarise vegetable farming.