A group picture of the organisers and participants
TechnoServe, a leader in business solutions, has launched the implementation of grant support for agri-Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) and micro-entrepreneurs along the poultry, tomato, rice, and soybean value chains.
The support forms part of the Harnessing Agricultural Productivity and Prosperity for Youth (HAPPY) Programme.
The HAPPY Programme is an initiative of the Mastercard Foundation in partnership with Agri-Impact Limited.
Deputy Chief Executive Officer, Agri-Impact, Juliana Asante-Dartey, in her address explained that the event was to ensure the agri-businesses and micro-businesses understood the consortium’s especially, TechnoServe’s role in the Programme as well as support drive to growth and development.
“Even though we have increasingly gotten better at being self-reliant, we are still bringing in a lot of rice. Ghana’s demand for poultry is over 400,000 metric tonnes. The country is doing less than 20% of that, so most of it has to be imported. Even tomatoes—we still bring them in from neighbouring countries. The situation is not any different with soya, even though it is needed in the poultry and food processing industries,” she explained.
“We are seeking to improve outputs from the value chains to the tune of over 189,000 metric tonnes over four years. In terms of import substitution, we hope that we will be able to reduce importation by $200 million by the end of the four years,” she said.
In his welcome address, HAPPY Programme Director, Frank Obiora Mgbemena, noted that, TechnoServe, over the next two years, will work alongside the participants’ businesses to support business re-engineering efforts by providing technical assistance, grants, market linkages, crop business services, and developing the financial resilience of their businesses to attract more investment.
Agriculture Lead for the Mastercard Foundation in Ghana, Daniel Ninson, pointed out that the Foundation was poised to work with business leaders to strengthen ecosystems where young people could thrive.
One of the micro-entrepreneurs and a team lead at Hakama, a tomato processing company, Zainab Acheampong, expressing her excitement about the project, disclosing that the technical support and grant will help expand their business.
FROM David Afum, Kumasi