November 1, 2019 by Berber Kramer and Isabel Lambrecht Improving women’s economic empowerment continues to be the focus of a wide range of development projects, ranging from vocational trainings to microcredit to cash and asset transfers. In rural farming areas, such programs face the question of which approach is most effective—improving women’s access to agricultural […]
Crop diversity and household diets in Ghana
by Maxwell Young Ghana’s steady economic growth since the 1980s has helped reduce poverty and improve food security and is considered one of the development success stories of Africa south of the Sahara. Ghana’s agricultural transformation—improvements in farming technology, value chains, crop diversity, and other changes—has been key to that growth. Less clear, however, is […]
Too good to be true? A model for reaching poor farmers and reducing subsidy costs in Ghana
It is no secret that fertilizer subsidies are back in vogue across SSA as the preferred tool for governments trying to boost incomes of poor smallholder farmers by increasing farm production and agricultural productivity. The financial burden of fertilizer subsidies is also widely recognized, exacerbated by the expense of improving the accuracy of targeting, as […]
Changing gender roles in agriculture
Gender roles have important implications for agriculture and food security and have been a key consideration in the discourse on agricultural development over the last few decades. However, some commonly repeated facts about gender relations do not seem to hold true today in Ghana and elsewhere in the developing world. IFPRI-Ghana researchers interrogated 20 years […]
Transformation of urban food systems
The urban food system in Ghana is changing, with growth in household incomes and rapid urbanization. Such shifts in food systems commonly come with diet shifts, including increased consumption of processed foods, and may pose new opportunities and challenges for farmers, processors and consumers. However, with limited data on the topic, policymakers are ill-equipped to […]