The Biskaan Women Vegetable Farmers of Wa East: Agric success story in Upper West

IN the remote community of Biskaan in Wa East, Upper West Region, is Basirata Issahaqua, a nucleus farmer, who has been supporting some women farmers in the community to grow vegetables through irrigation.

She heads the Biskaan Women Vegetable Farmers, a group of 45 women who have come together to grow vegetables to complement their incomes from other ventures they undertake.

The growing of vegetables is in addition to other farming activities undertaken by these women, thereby helping them to earn extra income.

Vegetables cultivated by this group of women include garden eggs, tomatoes, onions, cabbages and chilli pepper and they sell the produce to restaurants and market women.

Currently, the women, numbering 45, are cultivating a one and half acre land which it is estimated will earn them approximately GH¢270,000 per season if the entire land is cultivated.

Genesis  

Madam Basirata said she grows other crops such as maize, soyabeans and groundnuts and has about 73 acres of farmland. In addition to food crops, she also has a vegetable garden for mainly subsistence.

She said with time the vegetable farming caught the attention of the women in the community who approached her for assistance to also grow some of the vegetables.

Consequently, she grouped them and they acquired the land close to her farm and began the group production of the vegetables.

Through the assistance of GIZ, she acquired a solar panel system to assist them in pumping water from the borehole she had drilled at the site to pump for irrigation.

Notwithstanding the solar-powered irrigation, she said the women still had to fetch the water with head pans to water the vegetables and “because the land was not protected, we had cattle going through the farm and destroying the crops.”

She said these were some of the challenges that they had to grapple with, coupled with the long distance of the farm from their homes.

Support

Madam Basirata said while trying to find solutions to their challenges, “I heard about the Market-Oriented Agriculture Programme in North West of Ghana (MOAP-NW).”

She said the programme supported the group with two overhead tanks, fenced the entire land and laid pipes and water hoses on the farm to ease the burden of fetching water from the standpipe to water the vegetables.

“The programme also supported us with water cans and other garden inputs and trained us in vegetable production,” she said.

She said aside from helping them to make extra income, the women used some of the produce for their household consumption and also saved some of the income to buy farming inputs for their farms.

Potentials

A Community Mobilisation Vegetable Expert, Abdul Saham Alhassan, who helped the group to establish the farm, told the Daily Graphic that if well harnessed, the group could survive on vegetable farming.

“This is because the market is there for whatever the farm would produce; they can sell directly to restaurants in the city or retail at the market,” he said.

He stated that the estimated revenue per quarter of an acre of vegetable was about GH¢4,500 “and with the irrigation system, they can produce all year round and would not need to wait for the rains.”

In all, he said the programme spent a total of GH¢671,000 to support the women.

Impression

During a field trip as part of activities to close the programme, the officer in charge of Sustainable Development and Infrastructure at the European Union Delegation in Ghana, Paulina Rozycka, said she was impressed with the impact the programme had made in the life of the beneficiaries.

Using the Biskaan experience as an example, she said the programme did not only afford the women an additional source of income, but also met the needs of the larger community through the production of vegetables for local consumption.

She said Biskaan was just one of the numerous success stories of the programme and was glad that it was implemented by using the district and regional offices of the Ministry of Food and Agriculture, where the lessons learnt could be used to replicate the initiative in other parts of the country.

MOAP NW is a German Development Organisation (GIZ) Project financed by the European Union (EU) and the German Federal Ministry of Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ).

The eight-year project, which started in 2017, was to support quality agricultural production with the objective of increasing incomes and creating jobs along the value chains of groundnuts, cashew nuts, mangoes, rice, sorghum, soybeans and vegetables.

It was implemented in 14 districts in three regions, namely: Upper West, North-East and Savannah.