Ghana’s agricultural sector is critical to economic growth and development. According to data presented by the Ghana Statistical Service, the sector contributes significantly to the nation’s annual GDP. In Ghana agriculture is dominated by smallholder farmers in rural areas, many of whom are family farmers who produce for local consumption and export. A lot of these smallholder families are poor, work under poor conditions, live on the farms and continue to drive the sector’s overall growth with their activities despite infrastructural and economic setbacks.
Today, Ghana’s rural communities are characterized by over-crowded compound housing, unsafe building structures and poor livestock housing. This can be attributed to the limited access to credit facilities for rural farmers. The high cost of construction, coupled with the limited credit for rural farmers make scaling up their farming businesses difficult. With a lot of areas requiring the attention of the government’s resources, the country’s rural regions are not receiving much attention in terms of resource allocation and so development is moving slowly.
