New technologies, high yielding crops introduced by WAAPP
Thirty agricultural technologies, including the release of high-yielding varieties of crops to ensure increased food production in the country, have been developed through the West Africa Agricultural Productivity Programme (WAAPP).
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The programme completes the first phase of the 10-year adaptability initiative by the WAAPP. The second phase ends next year.
However, WAAPP, which is under the auspices of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), has indicated that despite the increase in technologies, it is not getting to the targeted farmers in the communities.
Extension officers
A monitoring and evaluation officer of the WAAPP, Augustine Oppong Danquah, noted that the low extension officer to farmer ratio was partly to blame for the gap.
Subsequently, he indicated that WAAPP, under its Innovative Platform programme, was training more than 24 facilitators on ‘soft skills’ to enable them to use the various modules to get the messages and technologies to the farmers.
Facilitators
The facilitators were selected from 15 districts across the country to tackle a number of crop varieties, including beans, cassava, yam and soya beans.
The training was to deal with areas beyond the technical capabilities of the people, such as conflict resolution and negotiations, communication and team building and listening skills.
It was to equip the facilitators to identify the challenges in the dissemination of the technologies, as well as in the value chain of production, so that WAAPP could provide the right equipment to address them.
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The Director of the CSIR-CRI, Dr Stella Ama Ennin, noted that previous participatory research concentrated more on extension officers and farmers, to the neglect of the other players in the value chain production, including processing and marketing, and called for urgent need to bridge the gap.
She called for the involvement of higher level key players in the value chain production line, with emphasis on key policies to deal with areas that had not played their roles well.