The Africa Centre for Economic Transformation (ACET) has launched an online portal for smallholder farmers to enable them interact with policy makers in the agriculture sector.
Speaking at the launch via Zoom, Professor Ramatu Mahama Al-Hassan, a lecturer at the University of Ghana and an Agricultural Development Economist, acknowledged the importance of the portal. According to her, the portal, Smallholder Voices Portal, will be a ground for research findings and advocacy to improve the sector.
“In the context of today’s launch, I think the Smallholder Voices Portal will be a valuable channel for researchers to create awareness about ongoing research and to disseminate their research findings. Whether research findings are used for policies or not depends very much on whether there is demand for evidence. For that matter, the portal can also be a channel for advocate to express their research leadings.”
As a researcher, she explained the essence of research in policy-making and outlined some criteria research must meet for it to be considered in policy-making. She further urged her colleagues to be advocates for policy implementation to better improve the agric sector.
“I think that policy engagement process deals with identifying what needs to change and why. The primary role of research organizations is to generate evidence to inform decision-makers and most academics choose to stay within the grounds of conducting research and really do not want themselves to be advocates. They provide the evidence to others to advocate for. However, researchers can make their roles and themselves useful by ensuring that their research meets at least three criteria; credibility of the methods, the quality of recommendations and the timeliness of evidence.”
The Chief Executive Officer of Chamber of Agribusiness, Anthony Morrison also present for the launch lauded the portal and stated that his outfit appreciates policy engagement processes. He indicated that the Chamber has had various activities to involve smallholder farmers in the process.
“The chamber of agribusiness has been working very considerably in the area of policy advocacy and as much as trying to pull along smallholder farmers to appreciate the need for policy integration, policy involvement and also to help them to understand what matters when it comes to the areas of policy education. Four years ago, we introduced something called the agriculture policy schools for smallholder farmers. This was practiced for collaboration mainly to drive in the need to give capacity to smallholder farmers to understand how policy formulation is done, policy designing and how the smallholder farmer ought to see himself as a very important fulcrum in the whole policy design process.”
According to him, it was successful at the initial stages however, the lack of appreciation by smallholder farmers for non-materialistic things quenched the Chamber’s zeal.
“It was very successful but we realized that farmers do not appreciate anything which is not material…they don’t really see as something that actually benefit. They have always been on the borderline of advocating or pushing for materialistic things like input, fertilizers, seeds, cutlass, things that help them in their production process. But when you tell them your decisions or projections must inform these materials so we bring it to you, they don’t understand.”
He further noted the literacy level of the smallholder farmers as the main challenge but said the Chamber is working on finding a level ground by incorporating ways to simplify the need for policy process engagement in simpler terms.
“The actual challenge we face was that, farmers have absolutely no knowledge about policy decision and they do not have the impetus or the very technical aspect of policy formulation. First of all, their standard of education even though we do this through the local medium that is, using the local languages, we have adopted a very unique system which is called the cartoon system where we module cartoons to play to these people to understand how policies work. But above all they expect that once you come to them, they have come for some reward. they expect something back, not in words but materials.”
Also present was the Assistant Director for the Extension Services Directorates at Ministry of Food and Agriculture, Kwesi Abaka-Quansah. He noted that smallholder farmers are not heard and do not have policies formulated for their benefits because they do not have well created groups or associations hence, his outfit is guiding them on how to go about it.
“Majority of farmers are not well created groups in Ghana. What we do is to encourage them to come into groups from the district levels to the regional levels to the national levels from where their ideas could be heard.”
He however stated that since their involvement with the farmers, there has been considerable change and the farmers are now seeking for leadership positions and involvement in policy-making.
