The Country Lead for the USAID Feed the Future Ghana Policy LINK, Mr. Yunus Abdulai, has disclosed steps taken in collaboration with the Ghana Meteorological Agency to provide the Ghanaian farmer with real time location-based weather information as part of measures to ensure climate resilience.
He explained: “So we will deliver location-based where a farmer will get information around the weather at his farm and not just a general information that it will rain in Tamale and Tamale is so big but the farmer will get information that it will rain in Gumani today and that is the location-based information that we’re working with the Ghana Meteorological Agency to put in a regulation to support this service delivery in Ghana”.
Similarly, he disclosed Ghana Policy LINK is working with the National Insurance Commission (NIC) to operationalized the Ghana Agriculture Insurance Fund stating this will be a big game changer if the fund is operationalized stressing it will provide premium insurance subsidizes to farmers.
Mr. Yunus indicated the premiums are presently very high asserting this fund is coming out with modalities to subsidize insurance premium which in his view will entice financial institutions to provide finances to the sector because they know the farms are insured.
Mr. Yunus Abdulai made these remarks in an interview with THE CUSTODIAN after a two-day consultative Regional Learning Event on September 16 and 17, 2024, in Tamale.
The participants were stakeholders working in the agricultural sector including government agencies, private sector, civil society organizations, youth and women serving organizations and some selected media organizations.
The USAID through the Feed the Future Ghana Policy LINK since 2021 has introduced various interventions including Women Awardees Training, Climate Finance capacity building training, Leading for Change, among others.
The activity being implemented in the Northern, North East, Upper East and Upper West regions aims to improve quality and use of evidence for policy-making, improve collaboration in knowledge management and participatory learning for policy and a more inclusive, coordinated and transparent policy decision-making process by agriculture and food security system stakeholders.
Meanwhile, from 2021 to 2024, the activity has engaged over four thousand individuals in food security programs expanding the activity’s outreach and impact. This has also fostered collaboration among over 200 key organizations in a multi-stakeholder platform enhancing cooperation in food security endeavors.
Among other key progress of the activity include the empowerment of 49 female farmers to champion gender equality and female empowerment in both public and private sector, provided access to over 3000 farmers to climate information services in the five regions of the North and organized 17 impactful climate-policy dialogues to elevate awareness and enhance climate change knowledge at both national and sub-national level.
