Over the next five years in Ghana, Feed the Future aims to help an estimated 860,000 vulnerable Ghanaian women, children and family members—mostly smallholder farmers—escape hunger and poverty. More than 324,000 children will be reached with services to improve their nutrition and prevent stunting and child mortality. Significant numbers of additional rural populations will achieve improved income and nutritional status from strategic policy engagement and institutional investments.

To meet its objectives, Feed the Future Ghana is making core investments in three key areas: 

1. To achieve food security, agriculture programs will focus on driving a step-change in the volume and value performance of core staple value chains—starting with rice, maize and soy—and improving the governance of marine fisheries resources.

• Improving the Enabling Environment for Private Sector Investment
• High Impact Value Chain Activities and Investment

2. To help reduce malnutrition and improve household resilience of vulnerable populations, agriculture and nutrition programs will focus on a) improving access to diverse quality food, b) improving nutrition-related behaviors within vulnerable households, c) developing community mechanisms to identify and address their food and nutrition problems, and d) strengthening coordination of government and other actors to meet food security and nutrition objectives.

3. To improve the nutritional status of women and children, nutrition programs will focus on:

• Improving nutrition-related behaviors and community norms regarding nutrition
• Expanding community-based treatment of acute malnutrition of children
• Expanding the accessibility of safe, quality foods available for child weaning in Ghana
• Identifying and addressing the root causes of severe levels of anemia among women and children in Ghana

In addition to these three core areas, environment, natural resource management, climate change, and gender are incorporated as cross-cutting issues in all programs and activities as guiding principles.

Target Regions

A strategic focus on the rice, maize and soy value chains for five years could raise tens of thousands of people out of poverty, 75 percent of whom would be in northern Ghana. Improving marine fisheries governance in the Western Region will benefit fishery households and increase the nutritional status of fish consumers across Ghana. 

Highlights

Northern Zone. The rural northern regions have the highest rates of food insecurity in the country—as much as seven times the national average. The northern zone program will aim to improve economic opportunities and diversify household income by doing the following:

• Identifying and facilitating private investment into the agriculture sector in order to strengthen rice, maize and soy value chains to produce more and better staple food products
• Leveraging technical knowledge and seeking innovations, especially in the areas of science and technology
• Increasing income during lean periods
• Encouraging the production of nutritious foods for household consumption and income generation
• Supporting communities to develop plans for storage, food safety and food security
• Improving nutrition-related behaviors

Coastal Marine Fisheries Zone. Poverty in the coastal areas of Ghana is extensive, with the average welfare level among food farmers in rural coastal areas 12 percent below that in large urban centers such as Accra. Marine capture fisheries are the major economic activity along the coast and their importance reaches far beyond the coast. There is strong evidence that Ghana’s coastal ecosystems are already seriously degraded and experiencing erosion and  will undoubtedly be under growing pressure with an oil and gas industry on its way. The Feed the Future program will: 

• Support direct, targeted interventions where the poor fisheries-dependent households are located and focus on what has greatest potential for improving their situation, as well as the environment
• Increase the ability of coastal residents to better access and manage their most important productive asset: marine fisheries

National Scale Nutritional Programming. In coordination with other development partners, Feed the Future will support the Government of Ghana’s implementation of a comprehensive program of community-based management of acute malnutrition through a comprehensive behavior change program. This comprehensive package will improve nutrition-related behaviors and will be incorporated into programming in the Western, Central, and Greater Accra regions. Operational research will be conducted in 2011–2012 to better understand the extremely high rates of anemia among children in Ghana. This research will be used to develop key nutritional aspects of Feed the Future programming and to shape a national child anemia strategy and program that can be undertaken by Ghana Health Service and its development partners.