Aragie, Emerta; Artavia, Marco; Pauw, Karl 2019
In 2014, African heads of state reaffirmed their commitment to the Comprehensive African Agricultural Development Program (CAADP) through the adoption of the Malabo Declaration (AU 2014). The declaration included commitments to reduce hunger and poverty, boost intra-regional trade, enhance resilience to climate variability, and, in line with the Maputo Declaration a decade earlier, to continue allocating to agriculture at least 10 percent of government expenditure. Despite this long-standing spending commitment, Ghana’s agricultural budget share has remained well below 10 percent during the last decade. Depending on accounting principles followed, estimates range from 1 to 2 percent (CAGD 2016), 2 to 4 percent (FAO 2014) or 6 to 8 percent (MoFA 2017a). Given strong evidence that agricultural spending in developing countries yields significant returns (Mogues et al. 2015), Ghana’s relatively weak agricultural performance during the period from 2007 to 2017 may be linked to low levels of spending. At 4.3 percent per annum, agricultural GDP growth has only been half that realized in the non-agricultural sectors (MoF 2018). This weak agricultural growth has also not benefited the poor. Rural poverty has increased in recent years, especially in northern Ghana (GSS 2018). While budgetary allocations to agriculture matter, the quality of spending is as important (Akroyd and Smith 2007). In this regard, concerns have been raised about the decline in allocations to agricultural research, knowledge transfer, and infrastructure in favor of spending on routine operations (FAO 2014; World Bank 2017). Ideally, sector budgets should maintain a healthy balance between investments in a sector’s capacity to grow, e.g., infrastructure or farmers’ knowledge, and expenditures that are fully consumed in the same period, e.g., operational expenses or subsidies (Benin & Tiburcio 2018; Mogues et al. 2015). Following Ghana’s unfavorable assessment in the African Agricultural Transformation Scorecard (AATS), which was launched by the African Union (AU) in 2018, and in light of policy developments, budgetary trends, and socioeconomic outcomes, Ghana’s development partners called for an increase in funding allocated to the agriculture sector at the national Joint Sector Review for Agriculture in June 2019. They further called for improvements in the effectiveness of agricultural spending, with the distortionary effects of large-scale subsidy programs highlighted as a specific concern. A recent study led by IFPRI’s Ghana Strategy Support Program (GSSP) and FAO’s Monitoring and Analyzing Food and Agricultural Policies (MAFAP) project considers these issues further (Aragie et al. 2019). Specifically, using an economywide model of the Ghanaian economy, the research-ers examined how changes in the level and composition of public agricultural expenditure affect socioeconomic outcomes in the short and medium term in Ghana. This note highlights selected key study findings.

Resnick, Danielle 2018
In 2009, Ghana passed Local Government Instrument 1961 (LI 1961) to devolve a set of functions from the central government to the country’s 216 Metropolitan, Municipal, and District Assemblies (MMDA). Agriculture, along with public works and social welfare, was among the first sectors to be devolved. This transfer was formally institutionalized in 2012. In addition, LI 1961 stipulated that the staff of the MMDA departments were to be transferred from the national civil service to a newly created Local Government Services (LGS). A composite budget system also was introduced, which integrated the budgets of all departments of the MMDAs into the overall budget for the MMDA.

Miranda, Mario; Mulangu, Francis; Kemeze, Francis H.; Kolavalli, Shashidhara 2018
In practice, however, warehouse receipt financing has generally failed to deliver the benefits to smallholders hoped for by development economists and practitioners. In Ghana, and more generally throughout Africa, warehouse receipt financing is currently used almost exclusively by large traders, processors, and exporters. In this brief, we explore reasons why smallholders have shunned warehouse receipt financing and discuss policy prescriptions that could make warehouse receipt financing more accessible and beneficial to them.

Diao, Xinshen; Silver, Jed 2017
Ghana’s population is becoming younger and increasingly urbanized – by 2010, over half the population lived in urban settlements of more than 5,000 people – raising concerns among policy makers regarding the location and types of jobs required to employ the youth. The slow creation of for-mal urban jobs has particularly strong implications for young people entering the labor force: they are more educated than the older generation, with greater aspirations for non-farm employment and urban lifestyles (Anyidoho, Leavy, and Asenso-Okyere 2012). Without rapid industrialization to create more formal manufacturing and other non-agricultural jobs, youth in Ghana who leave the agricultural sector are increasingly likely to resort to informal services in both rural and urban areas. While much youth-related research has focused on changes in youth employment and livelihoods through rural-urban migration, a re-cent IFPRI Discussion Paper focuses on youth in the rural non-farm economy (Diao et al. 2017).

Aboagye, Patrick Ohene; Abubakar, Abdullahi Garba; Adama, Abdulai Iddrisu; Lawal, Akeem; Musa, Aliyu Abdullahi; Takeshima, Hiroyuki 2016
Past agricultural mechanization efforts in Ghana and Nigeria have focused more on the styles of machinery used in western countries or Latin America, where average farm sizes are much larger. While West African countries, particularly Ghana, are still relatively land abundant compared to Bangladesh, seeking the right balance across various models is important for achieving mechanization growth across diverse types of farms. Learning from the experience of agricultural mechanization in Bangladesh offer useful inspirations toward how widespread mechanization growth can happen for smallholders in Ghana and Nigeria.

Houssou, Nazaire; Kolavalli, Shashidhara; Silver, Jed 2016
Agricultural intensification has only taken off to a very limited extent in Ghana. Adoption of land productivity-enhancing technology is low, even in areas with proximity to urban markets. Rather, farmers have increasingly been adopting labor-saving technologies such as herbicides and mechanization, for which vibrant private supply channels are emerging. Further efforts to strengthen the private mechanization supply chain would help meet the rising demand for tractor services. Furthermore, mechanization could also help free up agricultural labor to perform other more labor intensive tasks.

Andam, Kwaw; Silver, Jed 2016
As a rapidly-urbanizing, lower middle-income country, Ghana is experiencing diet changes that are spurring a growing demand for processed foods. Recent surveys show significant presence of processed goods in retail shops, including milled rice, processed fruits and vegetables, and frozen meats, but only about a fifth of these products are processed locally. The main reason processing has failed to take off is not lack of policy: Ghana has always been interested in processing of tomatoes, has established a presidential initiative for processing cassava, and aims to process half of the cocoa produced locally. Rather, the main constraint to a vibrant processing sector is the low production and productivity, high cost, and poor quality of local raw materials. This brief describes these key constraints for growing a thriving domestic food processing sector and high-lights some opportunities for growth.

Houssou, Nazaire; Aboagye, Patrick Ohene; Kolavalli, Shashidhara 2016
Rising labor costs associated with increased rural-to-urban migration have compelled Ghanaian farmers to increase the use of tractors and other agricultural machines to conduct farming operations in the country (Diao et al. 2014). The adoption of these mechanical technologies is consistent with the tendency among Ghanaian farmers to save labor, rather than embrace practices that create additional labor needs (Houssou et al. 2016). Tractor use is concentrated on plowing and other tillage operations primarily (Houssou et al. 2013), but the supply of tractor services is inadequate. Earlier research estimated that plowing services represent 90 percent of the revenues of tractor service providers (Houssou et al. 2013). Both public and private supply of plowing services may have contributed to an expan-sion of the area under cultivation in Ghana, thereby exacerbat-ing labor bottlenecks in post-tillage field operations for many farmers.

Younger, Stephen D. 2015
In 2009, Ghana was one of the first African countries to accept the Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP) target of committing ten percent of government expenditure to agriculture. Despite this commitment, Ghana remains far short of that goal. In recent years, spending on agriculture has increased, but only to about 3.5 percent of total expenditures (Benin 2014; ReSAKSS 2015). To attain the CAADP target, Ghana needs to spend an additional 6.5 percent of total expenditures, or about 2 percent of GDP, on agriculture. Yet Ghana also finds itself needing to reduce an historically large and persistent budget deficit of about ten percent of GDP. In such difficult fiscal times, is it possible for Ghana to meet its CAADP commitment?

Kolavalli, Shashidhara; Silver, Jedediah; Benin, Samuel; Johnson, Michael E. 2015

Houssou, Nazaire; Diao, Xinshen; Kolavalli, Shashi 2014
Increasing agricultural mechanization has long been of interest to many African countries. Constrained by the limited area that can be cultivated through the use of the hand hoe and its association with perceptions of primitiveness and drudgery, agricultural mechanization and large-scale farming have long been a part of the vision of modernizing agriculture in many African countries, including Ghana.

Ragasa, Catherine; Chapoto, Antony; Kolavalli, Shashi 2014
Maize is an important food crop in Ghana, accounting for more than 50 percent of the country’s total cereal production. The Ghana Grains Development Project (1979–1997) and the Food Crops Development Project (2000–2008) made major investments to improve maize yield. Despite these efforts, the average maize yield in Ghana remains one of the lowest in the world, much lower than the average for Africa south of the Sahara.

Ragasa, Catherine; Takeshima, Hiroyuki; Chapoto, Antony; Kolavalli, Shashi 2014
As rice imports surge ahead of production in Ghana, increasing rice production and yields has become a priority. Annual per capita consumption of rice in Ghana grew from 17.5 kg during 1999–2001 to 24 kg during 2010–2011. President Mahama, concerned with rising importation costs, suggested that rice should be produced locally (Asare‐Boadu & Syme 2014). As only 5 percent of global production is traded, local production would also protect consumers from price shocks in the world rice market (World Bank 2013). While substantial investments in national rice production have been made, local production is still not able to keep up with growing demand for rice in Ghana.

De Pinto, Alessandro; Demirag, Ulaç; Haruna, Akiko; Koo, Jawoo; Asamoah, Marian 2012

Diao, Xinshen; Breisinger, Clemens 2010
With an average growth rate of 5 percent and a reduction of poverty by one-half over the past two decades, Ghana is a recent success story and a rising star in African development. Yet the country remains dependent on relatively few external sources of income and its external debt has started to rise again (IMF 20081). The recent discovery of offshore oil is seen by many as an important new source of income, and an opportunity to overcome persisting structural weaknesses in exports and the economy as a whole, and raise Ghana's prospects of becoming a frontrunner in African development.

Banful, Afua Branoah 2010
Theories of fiscal federalism imply that determining intergovernmental transfers based on the political incentives results in inefficient allocation of resources across geographic regions. Such practices also can result in tensions between classes, and ethnic and religious groups, which are concentrated in distinct geographical areas. Nevertheless, empirical evidence consistently confirms that the practice of allocating government resources based on political relationships continues to be pervasive around the world. This brief summarizes the results of an IFPRI study in Ghana assessing the effectiveness of formulas as a strategy to limit political motivation behind resource sharing.