Provide farmers with solar dryers to efficiently process and preserve their farm produce whiles reducing their time burdens
About the Implementing organization
Name: Hogfe Foundation Ghana
Year of establishment: 2001
Type of organization: Community-based association or organization / Legally recognized non-profit status
The project is expected to get 10 Solar Tunnels Dryer bought, shipped, installed, and started up in the target area. Farmers in the target area would be trained and have technology and facility (solar dryer) to efficiently dry their maize, groundnuts, and cowpea, process etc and preserve it to meet the demands of the market. The people in this locality are mainly subsistent farmers, produce in excess of 60 metric tons can be dried. The staples are for consumption while the cash crops are for sale. The tunnel dryers will help to close the hunger losses and also prolong the shelf life of the produce. This will ensure an all year round supply of staples. The Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) and Crops Research Institutes will be providing the training to the beneficiaries. They have agreed to offer the training and they are well placed to offer the training. They have the mandate for agricultural technologies in the interior Savannah of Ghana.
Grasslands / Drylands
Type of Action
Protection / Sustainable use / Awareness and education
Sustainable Development Element
Jobs and livelihoods / Food security / Health / Renewable energy / Climate action
Rainfall patterns in both Ghana and have been shifting over the past fifty years. The Ghanaian EPA estimates that rainfall for all of Ghana has been decreasing by 2.4% per decade since 1960. The project reduces the large quantity of food lost through rotten by drying. The tunnel dryers will help to close the hunger losses and also prolong the shelf life of the produce. This will ensure an all year round supply of staples.Major food crops grown in the area include maize, cassava, groundnuts, yam, and cowpea. Major industrial crops include cotton, shea nuts, and cashew. Vegetable grown include pepper etc. These farmers are mostly smallholder farmers, cultivating between 1-5 acres (0.4-2 ha). The agricultural system in these areas is characterized by low productivity. This system hardly sustains the food security needs of the farm families throughout the season. This situation leaves the farmer in perpetual poverty. Consequently, living standards of the rural resource-poor farmer are low.
Sustainable Development Impacts
A major goal of the agro-entrepreneurial model is to encourage the emergence of a coterie of farmers who can combine sustainable farming systems with entrepreneurial initiatives that add value to their agricultural production. One precondition for sustainable agriculture in Africa is economic empowerment within rural communities that ensures food security and access to the basic needs of life in a way that also protects the natural environment. Agro-entrepreneurial approach to sustainability that combines farmers’ innate entrepreneurial abilities with sustainable agricultural practices. The farmers are unlikely to increase output or income significantly without resorting to unsustainable agricultural systems fertilizer use, markets and consumer tastes are evolving in ways that offer opportunities to increase their income. They can strengthen their economic security by adopting sustainable agricultural systems and targeting their production to take advantage of demands and consumption patterns.
The people in this locality are mainly subsistent farmers, produce in excess of 60 metric tons can be dried. The direct beneficiaries consist of the farming households within the twenty communities where the dryers shall be installed and the surrounding communities. Indirect beneficiaries include the stakeholders along the produce value chain (agro-input dealers, aggregators, traders, processors, and consumers) within and without the Tolon district and the nationwide. We intend to install the solar dryers or the pilot project of the solar dryers in all the 10 regions in the country.
The acceptance of the improved manual harvesting tool by farmers in Ghana who have had experience with it is a great achievement. Unfortunately, all training workshops organized were only limited to selected study locations; reaching only a handful of farmers across the country. It would be a big breakthrough if other farmers across all growing zones in Ghana receive similar training to promote nationwide adoption of the technology. Also, to make the technology easily accessible to farmers, training workshops are to be organized for some local farmers in selected study locations. Extension of such training workshops to reach other farmers across all growing zones in the country would go a long way to aid scalability and replicability of the technology. The Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) and Crops Research Institutes should be providing the training to the beneficiaries nationwide.
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